Language Learning - Useful or Pointless in the age of AI?

    We live in an epoch when there are constant technological advances, we see huge strides in the development of software and devices that implement AI to make our lives simpler - or that is what we are being told. Although AI does have its advantages, one of the key areas where so many gullible people, especially from anglophone countries like the UK, US (anglophone monolinguals), Australia, New Zealand, Canada (especially non-French speaking Canadians) are being lulled or deluded into believing is that linguistics or language learning, is actually an exercise in futility...or is it?

    Our brain is quite unique, its functionalities go beyond the understanding of human efforts to comprehend it fully. Even in this current day and age, when people would claim that the brain's functions have been fully understood because of advances in nuclear medicine and scanning devices like functional MRI among others, nobody, not even the most adept of researchers can claim that they have fully understood or grasped the intricacies of how the human brain processes language and enables us to communicate with others in our lives. Yes, there are some key areas which even chatGPT or Copilot will mention when you question them on the topic of neurolinguistics but these answers do not fully take into account the countless research papers that have been published online and offline on the topic of neurolinguistics and the benefits of learning languages in general - or simply put, knowing more than 1 language not only is a very healthy activity to improve brain health but also allows us to communicate with a greater portion of the Earth's population in a manner that builds interpersonal relationships far beyond anything that English alone as a common language across cultures and peoples can even envisage to accomplish.

    Those from anglophone countries who generally have a kind of woefully disgusting superiority complex that is to fixated on the roles of English as an international business language, turn a blind eye to the efforts of other non-English European countries that also did quite a lot in trying to spread their languages throughout the world as well, whether it is the French, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Italians and finally the Germans and such people tend to downplay the importance or usefulness of knowing these languages and parrot the hackeneyed idea that "Knowing English is enough" - something to which they add the argument that language learning is pointless in the age of AI devices that can do the job of interpretation for those who are too lazy and disinterested in learning languages like themselves. All of these countries did conquer other lands in both Asia, Africa and the Americas such that the colonial languages of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian and German are still being spoken by people in many of these countries where their colonial efforts were invested. Although some of these countries have been more successful than others that came much later like the Italians or Germans in Africa, a large number of countries in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas do speak languages like French, Spanish, Portuguese and there are a handful of countries that speak German in Europe as well. So is it futile to learn these colonial languages or even non-colonial native ones?. We will look at these below.

i) Knowing more than 1 language is very good for the human brain as shown by countless research articles - bilingualism or multilingualism.
ii) Using AI technologies like handheld devices that interpret for you, takes away an authentic cultural and linguistic experience that you can enjoy when you visit a country where a particular language is spoken. Hence, AI interpretation devices do more harm than good to our human brain, if we rely on them for languages that we already know and can speak to build relationships with natives. This harmful effect of AI been shown in other areas like people who lose their ability to build mental maps of their surroundings because of excessive use of technologies like Google maps especially when they know the destination and all possible routes that can be taken to reach them, in language-learning and use, using AI for languages already known to the speaker deprives him/her from fully reaping the benefits of knowing a certain language as a language learner aside from taking its toll on the relational aspect between him and the speakers of those other languages as the human communicative touch is lost if an AI handheld device comes between him and the native speaker as an unwanted interface of sorts.
iii) Knowing and using languages with native speakers of those languages helps in building cross-cultural bonds and understanding between people of various nations and cultures at the grassroots level and not just at a macroscopic diplomatic level which again has numerous advantages in fostering world peace and working towards achieving a more permanent world peace through constant development and collaborations between nations and their people groups.
iv) Knowing and using languages and constant learning has been shown to push back the age when dementia in adults and aged people usually tends to set in.
v) Multilingualism shows that a person has the humility to acknowledge that the world is not just made up of his country, his people or his language but many more nations, languages and cultures each with their own unique perspective and creative way of expressing their thoughts that goes hand in hand with their cultural norms and patterns and is therefore willing to learn and reach out to those people in a language that is closer to their heart than to their mind as in the case of a common foreign language like English.
vi) Multilingualism, at a deeper level, helps a person to appreciate and see languages beyond what they are at face value - mere tools or vehicles for communication, an ostensibly pathetic and deplorable way of thinking about languages that has caused more damage to the proper use of languages in line with their grammatical rules in many lands (such people think "why bother learning grammar when I can express my thoughts in broken (language name)?") because every language in the world is unique and a heritage to be passed on to humanity's posterity because different languages have different ways of expressing the same ideas and sometimes no words exist in other languages for certain words in some languages and there are such words in every language. Throughout history, humanity has used languages to express its creativity and literary faculties through poetry and prosaic texts about not just everyday life in a particular culture but about the history of that culture, its tales, epics and folklore.
vii) Multilingualism further aids in enabling people to read and appreciate literature in the languages in which their authors wrote them. This ties up with point no. vi) because every language has its own words, expressions and ways of carrying across ideas that are intrinsic to that language, hence much meaning gets lost in translation before the work reaches the final reader in English.

Ergo, is language learning useless in this day and age with the advent of AI-enabled translation software and handheld interpretation devices? - The answer is a resounding "NO". On the contrary, humanity will lose out on its mental faculties in language learning and use only if it willfully chooses to forego language learning because of the availability of such AI devices. What I have written above as points for reflection are but a few of yet so many points that can be written about the benefits of language learning and use whereby "neuronal plasticity" - a function of the human brain to develop itself and grow leading to better brain health, is put to use as a person learns a language aside from active use of his/her memory to remember words, grammar rules and proper syntax in language learning, all of which develop through active practice while a person writes in a new language but also speaks it to those around him/her.