The role of language in digital economy and how Nigeria is already disadvantaged

When we see a BBC Yoruba or Hausa service, we often miss the import of such products. The BBC and other similar global brands understand that language transcends mere words. Language defines the culture, institution, organisation, worldview, practices, and persona of a people. The Yoruba language, for instance, reflects the people’s cultural practice of reverence for the elderly and people of higher social status through its honorific pronouns. The language also conveys the Yoruba’s high sense of empathy, friendliness and warmth through its rich array of expressive greeting repertoires.

The Yoruba have a unique greeting for almost every life situation. Ẹ kú ọwọ́ lómi (greeting for couples with newly birthed baby); Ẹ kú ara fẹ́ ra kù (condolence greeting); Ọkọ aare fo o (expressing safety for a driver on a journey); Aroko b’ọdún dé (wishing a farmer sound health to farm); Aboru boye o/Ebo a fin o (prayer for an individual’s sacrifice to be acceptable to the gods); Oju gboro oo (greeting for a hairdresser); Ẹ kú iṣẹ́ (general greeting for workers); Ẹ kú ìtàdí (greeting for someone who farts); Ẹ kú àìríni àìbèrè ẹni (a friendly accusatory statement to say someone didn’t ask after you).

Language defines economic opportunity and progress

Language drives entrepreneurship, moulds economies, and in today’s digital world, language provides access to a global market. The nuanced exchange that connects language to economic growth is very clear. The language of international trade and commerce is largely English, the most widely spoken language in the world, due to the global leadership role played by the United States of America, an English-speaking society, and before it the British Empire, which stretched from the Indian subcontinent, across swathes of Africa and all the way to Australia. To gain access to the global market, Chinese e-commerce site Temu, a spinoff from its local sister Pinduoduo, was established to tap into the English-speaking markets in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, before its spread globally.

Many of our Igbo brothers who are importers of Chinese goods have mastered Mandarin or Cantonese, or sponsored representatives, a brother, relative, close friend, etc., to China to live and master these languages for trade purposes. The ability of these importers to speak these languages gives them a unique advantage as it enables them to seamlessly engage in negotiations with suppliers in China. Because of the cultural nuances languages convey and the affinity they can wrought, the ability to speak the language of a trade partner helps the multilingual Igbo importer to navigate diverse context with his Chinese supplier, which gives him an advantage in price negotiations and other concessions.

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Language builds relationships, trust

Language helps build community relationships in a multifaceted society. For instance, the United Kingdom Metropolitan Police, as part of its efforts to build a strong relationship with a growing Yoruba community in the UK and fight crime effectively, engaged the services of individuals of Yoruba heritage who are versed in their mother tongue. These individuals are often deployed on policing and community engagement duties to areas with high Yoruba populations.

Language, digitisation and economic growth

The global shift to a digital economy has further underscored the importance of language in trade relations, socio-economic engagements, diplomacy, politics, governance, investments, and technological developments. In technological innovation, for instance, which underpins digital economy, researches and scientific breakthroughs and literature are mostly couched in English language to ensure dissemination reaches a global audience. Physicists and other scientists from across the world have regularly collaborated in English language. Software development is mostly English based. Many of the programming language driving some of the world’s momentous technology breakthroughs today are English based: Python, C++, and Java. For instance, Java and Python are widely used for artificial intelligence. Python underlines the main structure of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Language and Generative AI

With Generative AI driving almost every aspect of our lives, economies are already tapping into the trend to enhance productivity and achieve desired growth and development. While many AIs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Flux, and Ideogram and their underlying software have strong English language components, the tech giants behind these chatbots like Google, OpenAI, Microsoft often try to localise their software interfaces to increase their share of the global market.

Nigeria playing catchup in GenAI

Unfortunately, as pivotal as GenAI is to socio-economic development Nigeria is ill prepared to take advantage of the many opportunities or benefits inherent in it. And the reason is simple. Language. Nigerian languages, except for Yoruba and Hausa, are not part of the development of AI because they are mostly spoken; they are low-resource language in natural language processing (NLP). The vast amounts of written texts in Nigerian languages required to train AI on are not available online. And investments to make such languages available is poor or nonexistent.

The only effort I am aware of to train AI on Nigerian languages, Yoruba and Hausa particularly, is the Bill Gates sponsored African Next Voices project. The project engaged computer scientists and linguists to produce AI-ready datasets in 18 African languages, with Yoruba and Hausa being part of the 18. Latest report showed that the African Next Voices team has managed to record 9,000 hours of speech in diverse situations in healthcare, education, and farming in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, the largest dataset of African languages online.

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Investments by individuals barely scratch the surface

One must commend efforts by individuals, Nigerians to create language datasets online that GenAI and other language software can draw on. Recently, a US-based Nigerian, Ikeoluwa Abioye, launched Alarino, a digital platform to help preserve Yoruba language. NKENNE is an African language learning app, where subscribers can learn 13 African languages, including Igbo, Nigerian pidgin, and Yoruba.

Investments by forward-thinking govts

Governments recognise the nexus between economic growth and language, and the forward-thinking ones who hope to be global leaders are investing heavily in propagating their languages both locally and globally. For instance, the Chinese government established the Confucius Institutes as a platform to promote Mandarin globally as it positions for business ties across the world. Singapore promotes bilingualism as a strategy to attract international investors.

The Lagos State government may have taken the first step in what appears to be a strategy to develop the Yoruba language, make it accessible to locals and foreigners, and empower citizens, who ordinarily would have been sidelined, to participate in governance. The state recently announced plans to translate existing state laws from English to Yoruba. The government said it hoped to utilise OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology for the translation process.

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Government to take the initiative

The current administration has spoken of its desire to build a trillion-dollar economy. This is achievable if the government can make the necessary investments in policy terms and in funding of language-related initiatives. The government must realise that language is critical to economic growth in a digitalised world. Imagine a Morufu Carpentry store in Fiditi, Oyo State, being able to deploy AI chatbots that he can engage with in Yoruba language and what that could do to his product designs and overall productivity. Or an Emeka and Sons bead shop in Ogidi, Anambra State, being able to use a chatbot that understands his Igbo language prompts and can help to point him to the best places to source for beads at competitive rates.

The key drivers of the desired economic growth in the country will be small and medium scale enterprises, which are mostly informal in nature and are often overlooked by government policies and initiatives. Government must drive the development of local languages and their incorporation into GenAI development to guarantee access to opportunities by these SMEs while positioning them for growth and global expansions. Government can start by ensuring that local languages, Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa, enshrined in the constitution as official languages alongside English are actually used. Government documents such as a gazette, communiques, policies, and other official contents should be rendered in all the official languages: English, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa.