The Hague Statement on Linguistic Justice in Knowledge
Read at the closing session of the conference, 18 June 2027
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
Preamble
We, researchers, librarians, translators, publishers, teachers and software builders from more than forty countries, gathered in The Hague and at a distance, write this statement at the end of three days of conversation. Many of us did not come to this city; not for lack of wish, but because our visas were refused. That simple fact is part of the problem we have been discussing.
Human knowledge is made in thousands of languages, but it is recorded, reviewed, indexed and rewarded in a handful. This inequality is not natural. It is the product of colonial history, the economics of publishing, rankings, and policies that confine 'multilingualism' to the official languages of a few states. Large language models, most of them trained on texts in those same few languages, now make this inequality automatic and invisible.
At the same time, institutions that once guarded knowledge are being worn down by indicators, by markets and by authoritarian power. Universities expel their teachers, journals hand review to machines, and governments switch off the internet. We believe the answer is not a return to the past, but the building of infrastructures that give knowledge back to the people who make it and read it.
Commitments
- We hold every work of knowledge to be original in the language in which it was written. A translation is a representation of the work, not its replacement, and the translator's name always stands beside it.
- We ask knowledge infrastructures to record the original language of every text and to treat no language as the default.
- We use language models and machine translation as tools, not as authors. We publish no text unless a human being takes responsibility for it.
- We demand that data taken from the languages and communities of the Global South to train models come with consent, transparency and a fair share.
- We ask Europe's research institutions to extend their policy of multilingualism to the languages of migrants, of minorities and of peoples without a state.
- We ask research funders to spend public money on public infrastructure and non-commercial open access, not on per-article publication charges.
- We ask universities and ministries to separate the assessment of research from commercial indexes and global rankings, and to give equal weight to work written in local languages.
- Archives and libraries holding collections from Indigenous communities and former colonies must rewrite the description of those collections together with their owners, and recognise their right to control and to reclaim them.
- We support exiled scholars and those who teach outside institutions, and we will build ways to record, recognise and preserve their work.
- Knowledge infrastructure must withstand censorship and internet shutdowns: open, distributed, and able to be rebuilt from scattered copies.
- Scholarly conferences must offer remote participation, travel support and help with visas, so that borders do not decide who may speak.
- We publish this statement in many languages and invite everyone to render it into their own. Every translation carries the same authority as this text.
After The Hague
This statement is not the end of the work. Within the next twelve months its signatories will report on what they have done in their own institutions and fields, and the next meeting of this conference will open by reading those reports. Linguistic justice in knowledge is not won with a text; it is won through thousands of small decisions in the design of every form, every database and every budget.
The participants of the conference
References
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers.
Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication. 2019.
UNESCO. 2021. UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. Paris: UNESCO.
Carroll, Stephanie Russo, et al. 2020. 'The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.' Data Science Journal 19 (1): 43.
Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. 1996. World Conference on Linguistic Rights, Barcelona.