Interview with Isabelle Zaugg: On Explorations of Global Language Justice

Isabelle Zaugg wrote what may be the first humanistic dissertation on the Unicode Standard in 2017, launching her engagement with SEI and with Unicode. Since then, she’s been closely involved in envisioning new directions for SEI and nurturing interdisciplinary scholarship on language support in digital environments.

We’re excited to share this interview with her alongside the release of the special issue edited by Isabelle in Modern Languages Open, on “Digital Lives of Greater South Languages.” Read about Isabelle’s perspective and motivations behind this volume below.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and your area of research expertise.

I am a transdisciplinary Communication researcher working across the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Critical/Cultural Studies, Ethiopian Studies, Visual Culture Studies, Sociolinguistics/Graphemics, Oral History, and Documentary Film practice. A particular research focus is the field of digital language justice, in which I have investigated the digital vitality of Ethiopian and Eritrean languages as a gateway to understand the digital life of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages and close to 300 writing systems. My expertise bridges education, program management, and the arts, and I call Addis Ababa home.

2. How did you first learn about the Script Encoding Initiative?

I first learned about SEI in 2014 through my doctoral dissertation research, which grew out of my interest in the history of the grassroots development of digital software, hardware, and standards to support Ethiopian and Eritrean languages that utilize the Ethiopic script (autonym: feedel; fidäl, ፊደል). I first came into contact with Daniel Yacob, who among other innovators and close collaborators, was instrumental in bringing the Ethiopic script into the Unicode standard. He informed me about the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), and I was immediately drawn to the institution’s work to encode all of humanity’s diverse scripts -historic and modern – within Unicode. He also introduced me to Dr. Deborah Anderson, the founding director of SEI. She generously agreed to serve on my dissertation committee, and was instrumental in facilitating access to Unicode Technical Committee meetings, the Unicode archives, and connections with many contributors to Unicode and SEI’s work. 

Through this facilitation, I was able to write the first scholarly account of the work of Unicode to support digitally-disadvantaged scripts, greatly accelerated by SEI, as well as deeply investigate the journey of Ethiopic as the first indigenous African script to be encoded in Unicode. This research formed a core component of my 2017 doctoral dissertation, “Digitizing Ethiopic: Coding for Linguistic Continuity in the Face of Digital Extinction” and informed several subsequent publications. 

In particular, this work informed my contributions to the Sawyer Seminar on Global Language Justice at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in the City of New York, where I served as a Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow from 2017 – 2019. Topmost among these, I would highlight the three courses I developed, entitled “Global Language Justice in the Digital Sphere: Theory and Practice,” “Multilingual Language Technologies and Language Diversity,” (co-taught with Dr. Smaranda Muresan), and “Data Ethics in the 21st Century: People vs. Algorithms” (co-taught with Dr. Jonathan Reeve), where the work of SEI and Unicode was highlighted and where Dr. Deborah Anderson and Dr. Anshuman Pandey graced my classroom as guest lecturers.

3. How has working with the Script Encoding Initiative benefited your research? 

Working with SEI has given me an insider’s view regarding the practical steps required to encode a variety of scripts in Unicode, with each script requiring its own technical approach, research, and cooperation with the user community to get a proposal “right,” depending on a script’s characteristics and history. What is common is that Unicode inclusion provides a foundation for user communities to digitally write and exchange text in their preferred language, writing system, and script. This view into the work of SEI has greatly enriched my research as well as my teaching. Working with SEI has also developed in me a deep appreciation for how trusted and committed intermediary institutions can create a vital bridge between technical domains and the communities of users who can benefit from participating in these domains, but may not have the technical expertise to do so on their own. Dr. Deborah Anderson’s generosity to share her knowledge and facilitate connections has greatly benefited my research, and I hope it has in turn benefited those who have learned about SEI’s work through my publications and presentations about SEI’s vital role.

4. If you could recommend one book or article for a beginner in your field, which one would it be and why? 

I would recommend the book Global Language Justice, edited by Lydia H. Liu and Anupama Rao with Charlotte A. Silverman, and published by Columbia University Press in 2023. In particular, I would recommend my chapter, “Language Justice in the Digital Sphere,” which presents the complexities of achieving digital language justice according to the vision of speaker communities, while respecting the integrity of languages and their cultural underpinnings as they are “included” in digital systems shaped by pre-existing linguistic-cultural biases, and considering how negative impacts of digital inclusion for marginalized linguistic communities can be ameliorated. I would also highly recommend Dr. Deborah Anderson’s chapter in the same volume, “Digital Vitality for Linguistic Diversity: The Script Encoding Initiative,” which offers a master class in the work of SEI. 

This book project grew out of the Sawyer Seminar on Global Language Justice at Columbia University, described above. I would also recommend the Explorations in Language Justice Blog, where I served as Faculty Editor, which includes student reflections on the seminar and many excellent essays on language and script justice by students in my Columbia courses. I would mention that SEI’s brilliant Kyra Ann Dawkins wrote a piece for the blog!

5. What excites you most about the future of Unicode? 

While many predicted that the work of Unicode would be “done” just a decade or two after its founding in 1991 once the “major” scripts of the world were encoded, I am excited that the work of Unicode continues, leaving the door open for many additional scripts to be encoded with the critical support of SEI. I am also excited about the next chapter of SEI’s work with Unicode under the expert leadership of Dr. Anushah Hossain, and seeing how SEI’s role may evolve in a complementary fashion to its core mission of Unicode inclusion for all scripts. 

6. What would you like others to better understand about language justice and Unicode?

I would like people to understand the language justice dimension of Unicode’s work to expand inclusion of digitally-disadvantaged scripts. This is a key step towards language communities around the world gaining full access to the digital sphere in their own mother tongues and preferred languages and writing systems. The more linguistically inclusive the digital sphere becomes, the more the benefits of digital technologies will be distributed globally. This will in turn cultivate the vitality of diverse languages, writing systems, and scripts into the future. Fostering linguistic vitality is key to retaining and sharing humanity’s storehouse of knowledge and could potentially turn the tide on the steep language declines we see across the world. At the same time, I would like people to understand that digital inclusion is a double-edged sword for digitally-disadvantaged language communities, as it opens them to digital surveillance, manipulation, and control that can be highly detrimental. As such, I advocate for an approach to digital inclusion that takes into account the long-term impacts for language communities and is coupled with policies and protections that reflect the vision of these language communities for their future.

The more linguistically inclusive the digital sphere becomes, the more the benefits of digital technologies will be distributed globally.

7. You recently guest edited a special issue in the journal, Modern Languages Open, called “Digital Lives of Greater South Languages.” Could you tell us more about your goals for this issue and your thinking behind the introduction?

Thank you, and I am excited about the imminent publication of this special issue. The issue includes scholarly research and practitioner reflections that address the infrastructure and design that make communication in different languages and scripts possible, the language communities that flourish or aspire to flourish in digital spaces, and the possibilities, dangers, hopes, and fears that animate the deep-seated question of whether our digital sphere can ever truly reflect and support humanity’s linguistic diversity. I would argue that this question stems from a place that is also close to the heart of SEI’s work, which includes a collective desire to honor the linguistic dignity that every language community deserves, as well as to shift the geopolitics of knowledge so that the rich endogenous and ancestral knowledge that is closely tied to languages that have not been historically supported in the digital realm will have a better chance of being passed to the next generation. 

The “Greater South” framing arises from my work since 2023 as a scholar-practitioner advancing language justice issues at the Organisation of Southern Cooperation (OSC). OSC is an intergovernmental organisation founded in 2020 that represents Member States and Associate Members from across the Global South, focused on South-South cooperation in the pursuit of systemic transformations towards Balanced and Inclusive Education and the Third Way of Development – “from the South, for all Humanity.” His Excellency Manssour Bin Mussallam, Secretary-General of the OSC and a contributor to the special issue, coined the term “Greater South” in order to linguistically foreground a new form of multilateralism based on equality, equity, and solidarity as well as mutual cooperation in addressing development challenges and planetary threats of our era. The term is a departure from the ubiquitous “Global South,” which rests upon ambiguous and arbitrary geographical limitations, whereas “Greater South” recognises “a South in the North and a North in the South.” I felt this term best captured the issue’s scope, which addresses, for example, digital innovations in Indigenous languages of North America, that may not fall within a traditional “Global South” framing. 

I would also note that while my previous research widely utilizes the framing of “digitally-disadvantaged languages” – first formulated by Mark Davis, president and co-founder of the Unicode Consortium, and formally defined for scholarly use by myself, Dr. Anushah Hossain, and Brendan Molloy – I wanted to move away from this deficit-focused framing in the case of the special journal issue. I felt this was important because, as much as the digital sphere was by-and-large designed around the interests of Global North languages and their speakers, leaving other languages at a disadvantage, I wanted the issue to also showcase the innovation and flourishing of Greater South languages in digital spaces. Additionally, I appreciate that the term “Greater South” is designed to foreground the perspectives of communities within the Greater South itself. Finally, the term usefully points to the importance of multilateral cooperation across countries, communities, and regions to build a more linguistically diverse and vibrant digital sphere. I know the term may be new to many, and I hope it sparks fresh reflections and discussions.

“Digital Lives of Greater South Languages” is published by the open access journal, Modern Languages Open, and available here.