Last month, Apple unveiled its newest AirPods with a feature straight out of science fiction: slip them in, and they will translate a foreign language directly into your ears. The technology is remarkable. As Brian X. Chen noted in The New York Times, a conversation in Spanish became instantly comprehensible to him, despite his never having studied the language.
Such advances might suggest that the study of languages is becoming obsolete. After all, if an algorithm can render speech in real time, why should universities keep investing in language degrees? But the better machines get at translating words, the more essential human expertise becomes in understanding meaning. Far from being obsolete, language degrees are the very foundation for preparing graduates to use, guide and improve these technologies.
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Universities must train students to do what machines cannot. A degree in Spanish, Arabic or ancient Greek equips students with practical tools for understanding how people think, how history shapes communication and how cultural context changes meaning. These skills are directly useful in business, diplomacy, healthcare, technology and any field where working across cultures is part of the job. In California, with 40% of residents speaking a language other than English at home, these competencies are everyday necessities.
Far from being replaced by technology, language graduates are often the ones who make technology work. Large language models — the engines behind Apple’s new live translations feature — depend on human-curated corpora, grammatical analysis and expert evaluation. Without sustained investment in less-commonly-taught languages, even the most sophisticated AI systems will remain shallow, biased or inaccurate.
Universities face pressure to cut programs deemed “non-essential.” Language departments have too often been the first on the chopping block, especially when enrollments dip. Between 2016 and 2021, nearly 961 language-program instances disappeared (an 8.2% reduction in programs reporting enrollments). Behind these numbers are fewer opportunities for heritage speakers to study their family’s language, fewer pipelines training K–12 teachers, and fewer chances for students at public universities to gain access to the linguistic skills global employers demand.
At the same time California high schools are leading the nation in language achievement. Nearly 60,000 seniors earned the state Seal of Biliteracy last year. Colleges and universities must not dismantle the very programs that could carry that biliteracy forward into careers.
Higher education has a choice: retreat from language instruction under the illusion that “the machines can do it,” or double down on language and cultural programs as vital complements to technological tools.
Universities could build on their strengths by linking language programs directly to high-demand fields. Computer science students working on natural-language processing need courses in linguistics and less-commonly-taught languages to make their models accurate and fair. Business programs training students for global markets should require serious study of languages spoken where those markets are located.
Schools of public health and medicine should integrate medical Spanish, Mandarin or Arabic into their curricula so graduates can serve diverse patient populations more effectively. These kinds of partnerships show that language study is a core competency for the careers universities already claim to prepare students for.
To best prepare our students, universities must continue to invest in the rigorous, human-centered study of languages and cultures. These degrees are the foundation of communication in an age when words can be translated by machines, but meaning still requires a human mind.
The AirPods are a marvel. Technology will keep advancing, but it is people like our students, with the training universities provide, who will determine whether communication leads to connection or confusion.
Annie K. Lamar is an assistant professor of Classics at UC Santa Barbara, where she researches the intersections of ancient languages, artificial intelligence and education.