International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples
Preserving knowledge to empower communities
Publishing has always been about more than producing books or reports. It is about deciding how knowledge is documented, shared, and preserved across generations. As publishing, communication, and information-sharing become increasingly digital, globalised, and technology-driven, those decisions carry even greater significance. They influence not only how quickly information travels, but also whose knowledge is preserved, which languages remain visible, and which communities are able to participate in shaping our collective understanding of the world. Most especially, how do we ensure that indigenous, local, and minority languages continue to thrive rather than become increasingly marginalised?
The answer is not to resist technological change. Digital transformation has fundamentally reshaped how people create, access, and share information, opening unprecedented opportunities for multilingual communication. The challenge is to ensure that this transformation is inclusive, allowing technological innovation to strengthen rather than diminish linguistic diversity.
Language is far more than a tool for communication. Every language reflects a unique way of understanding the world. It carries histories, oral traditions, cultural practices, ecological knowledge, values, and ways of interpreting relationships between people and their environments. When a language becomes less visible in publishing or disappears altogether, societies risk losing not only vocabulary but also generations of accumulated knowledge and cultural memory.
The rapid expansion of digital publishing presents both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, electronic publishing, mobile technologies, online libraries, and artificial intelligence have significantly lowered barriers to creating and distributing multilingual content. A publication can now reach audiences across continents without the logistical constraints traditionally associated with print distribution. Translation technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated, while digital archives offer new ways to preserve oral histories, indigenous knowledge, and endangered languages for future generations.
On the other hand, digital transformation also risks reinforcing inequalities if only dominant languages remain visible within emerging information ecosystems. Many indigenous, local, and minority languages continue to have limited digital resources, including online dictionaries, searchable corpora, standardised orthographies, fonts, speech-recognition tools, and machine translation capabilities. As information increasingly moves online, languages that lack this digital infrastructure risk becoming less accessible to younger generations who learn, communicate, and seek information primarily through digital platforms.
To this end, supporting indigenous, local, and minority languages is therefore not simply a matter of translation. It requires deliberate efforts to commission multilingual publications, document oral traditions, preserve community histories, collaborate with local knowledge holders, and ensure that publications are designed to be accessible to diverse audiences and across technologies.
Technology itself can become an important ally in these efforts when developed responsibly. Artificial Intelligence can assist with translation, transcription, and language documentation. Digital publishing platforms can reduce production costs and increase the availability of multilingual resources. Interactive publications can integrate audio, video, and oral storytelling, helping preserve languages that have traditionally been transmitted through spoken rather than written forms. However, these innovations must be guided by principles of inclusion, ensuring that technological advancement reflects linguistic diversity rather than narrowing it.
In an increasingly interconnected world, publishers continue to assess how to create space for many languages, cultures, and perspectives to flourish together. By embracing multilingual publishing, ethical translation, digital innovation, and thoughtful knowledge preservation, publishers help ensure that indigenous, local, and minority languages remain living, evolving vehicles of knowledge rather than fading records of the past.
