One Young World opened the door; build AI for every language

On Nov. 6, I stood on the One Young World stage at ICM Messe Munich, looking out at 2,500 young leaders from 190 countries. The room fell quiet as I introduced myself in Kinaray-a, my mother tongue from Western Visayas in the Philippines. It was a short greeting, but for me it felt like bringing my whole community into a space where our language is almost never heard.

- ANNA MAE YU LAMENTILLO

I did not grow up imagining myself on a global stage.

As a child, I wrestled with a speech defect—words with the letter “s” made me stumble. My playmates mimicked my accent and my stutter. To them, I was a small, round, stuttering nerd. I became insecure, but I kept going to school. I learned to measure progress not in perfect consonants but in courage: one breath, one word, one more try.

On nights when my tongue felt locked, my mother would whisper proverbs in Kinaray-a. Slowly, my mouth would loosen to the sounds—familiar, ours. After decades of practice and stubborn repetition, my mouth finally caught up with my mind. The first time I addressed a room in English without stuttering, I felt a door swing open to a future I had never allowed myself to picture.

That journey taught me something I now see everywhere in the digital world: words are not equal. Language is not fair.

Today, that unfairness is embedded in our technology.

The world has about 7,100 languages. Over 40 percent are endangered, and without serious intervention, as many as 95 percent could disappear by the 22nd century. Yet the digital tools shaping our lives overwhelmingly serve just a tiny fraction of these languages—roughly a few dozen that have huge amounts of written and digital content.

In the Philippines, we have 175 languages. Fifty-nine are already considered endangered. Two have gone silent. The vast majority do not exist in the AI systems and platforms that claim to “speak the world’s languages.” When I tried using one of the most widely known AI tools in my own language, Kinaray-a, it simply did not understand me. That moment was more than a technical limitation; it was a reminder of who is seen as “worth understanding” by our technology.