Italy is characterized by a one-of-a-kind linguistic diversity landscape in Europe, which encodes local knowledge, cultural traditions, artistic expressions and history of its speakers. However, according to the UNESCO's Atlas of World's Languages in Danger, most local languages and dialects in Italy are at risk of disappearing within few generations.

Assumptions of the default language technology approach

The language technology community has recently begun to engage with endangered languages, including those of Italy. Yet, most efforts assume that these varieties are under-resourced language monoliths with an established written form and homogeneous functions and needs, and thus highly interchangeable with each other and with high-resource, standardized languages. As a result, language varieties of Italy are reduced to data commodities for machine learning advances, an approach that disregards the nature of these varieties and ignores their speakers' needs. Are Italy's varieties just another input to a language model?

Towards responsible, speaker-centric language technology

Ultimately, language technology should serve speech communities and their language varieties, and not the other way round. We advocate for a shift in the paradigm from machine-centric to speaker-centric language technology, and thus work that prioritizes languages and their speakers over technological advances. To ease this process, we initiated Varieties of the Boot, a community aimed at responsibly supporting the vitality of language varieties of Italy through sensitization on ethical engagement, sharing of practices, participatory collaboration, and active awareness-raising. To learn more, read the associated TACL paper.

  Ramponi, A. (2024). Language Varieties of Italy: Technology Challenges and Opportunities. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 12, 19–38.