Introduction to the Special Collection “The Digital Lives of Greater South Languages”

“The Digital Lives of Greater South Languages” is a special issue of Modern Languages Open which includes scholarly research, practitioner reflections, and speculative proposals regarding the digital vitality of languages from the Greater South. In this introduction to the special issue, the term “Greater South” is elucidated, which encompasses language communities that have been historically excluded from digital-linguistic support, many of which have nonetheless found pathways to flourish online, while centering their perspectives within the movement toward a digital sphere animated by their aspirations. The collection addresses language revitalization and reclamation facilitated by digital technologies, new connections forged among digital publics through language, the links between intellectual and digital sovereignty, language justice in the context of algorithmic tools such as machine translation and autocomplete, how digital infrastructure and typographic design ensure digital access for language communities, the invention of new scripts in the digital age, and the importance of strengthening our capacity to dream of a better future for our multilingual digital neighborhood.