This article analyses Dario Argento’s 1998 film The Phantom of the Opera as a distinctive reworking of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel. Rather than viewing it as an incoherent departure, the study reads the film as a cinematic exploration of Leroux’s unstable binaries—human/animal, child/adult, grand opera/carnival, and female otherness—central to the Gothic tradition. Employing close textual and visual analysis, combined with Gothic theory and art-historical interpretation, the article examines how Argento reimagines the Phantom as an attractive yet internally hybrid figure raised by rats, his subterranean lair evoking Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead and the fin-de-siècle homme de génie. Christine is reframed as a psychologically ambivalent heroine whose descent mirrors a confrontation with repressed desires, conveyed through tableaux referencing artists such as Jean-François Millet and Georges de La Tour. The Paris Opera House becomes a site where sublime artistic ideals are undermined by grotesque caricatures, echoing Victor Hugo’s grotesque–sublime aesthetic. Blending Gothic symbolism, carnivalesque satire, and art-historical homage, the film emerges as a visual meditation on identity, hybridity, and the instability of moral and social boundaries.
Published between 1886 and 1888, Italo Pizzi’s Il Libro dei Re was the first complete verse translation of the national epic poem of Iran, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (c. 1010 CE). This article draws on early theorisations of the role of translation and comparison in world literature (William Jones and Goethe) to analyse the wider cultural ramifications of Pizzi’s endeavour to introduce Ferdowsi to an Italian readership. After a broader contextualisation of the development of Oriental Studies in post-unification Italy, Pizzi’s translation, its paratext, and his other publications on Ferdowsi are analysed together in order to reconstruct his approach to literary translation and the dissemination of knowledge, in which literary comparison (in particular that between Ferdowsi and Dante) played a central role. Whereas the nineteenth-century reception of Persian classics such as the Shahnameh has received scholarly attention in the English, French, and German language contexts, little has been said of their Italian reception. This article brings to light the equally pioneering work of translation and dissemination that was undertaken in Italy, despite the young nation being late to professionalise Oriental Studies – Pizzi became Italy’s first Professor of Persian in 1887. In doing so, the article expands our understanding of the development of Oriental Studies in nineteenth-century Europe and reveals Italy’s distinctive place in the global circulation of Persian literature in translation.
Manssour Bin Mussallam is a Saudi national who, since 2020, has served as the Secretary-General of the Organisation of Southern Cooperation (OSC), headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. From 2016 to 2020 he founded and served as the President of the Education Relief Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland, with the purpose of developing, promoting and incorporating a Balanced and Inclusive approach to Education, based on the four pillars of intraculturalism, transdisciplinarity, dialecticism and contextuality. In 2025 he authored Una Carta Meridional: Apuntes desde el Claroscuro Mundial (translated into English as A Letter from the Greater South: Notes Amidst Global Disorder), laying out his vision for the “Greater South”, a phrase he originated to encompass vastly diverse countries, peoples and cultures who simultaneously share systemic characteristics, challenges and aspirations. Through his leadership of the OSC, the first intergovernmental organization of and by the Greater South, HE Sheik Manssour Bin Mussallam works towards the collective espousal and construction of a Third Way of Development founded upon the spirit of solidarity, multilateralism and self-determination and emerging through education. In this conversation with communication scholar Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg, who currently serves as Chief of Section – Knowledge Development and Democratization at the OSC, he shares how the revitalization of Greater South languages fits into this broader vision, illuminating language as a critical transversal across the domains of education, the geopolitics of knowledge, transdisciplinary research, technological innovation, digital sovereignty and multilateralism.
Machine translation (MT), which involves the use of algorithms to translate between languages, has advanced to a high level of quality for dozens of language pairs and is employed in an array of everyday contexts, including on social media. However, there are hundreds of languages for which there are insufficient digital resources to sustain quality machine translation, and errors abound even in translations for so-called “high-resource” language pairs. Meanwhile, although decades of research have led to improvements in MT system performance, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the social impact of MT systems. The present article builds on this burgeoning tradition and advocates for a language justice orientation in MT system development and design, focusing on online social media as a case study. This view advocates for transparency and consent in the application of machine translation. We also consider how language justice can inform the management of linguistic resources used to train MT systems.
While linguistic access in the digital sphere is a growing concern, many overlook the key role of written scripts in mediating who can fully utilize digital tools. This interview presents the experiences and perspectives of Kamal Mansour, a pre-eminent typographer working to support the world’s scripts with enabled fonts, in conversation with Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg, a scholar of communication and semiotics who investigates the technical foundations for digital language justice. An enabled font is a key piece of digital infrastructure required to exchange text in a script and the language(s) it represents, thus widening linguistic inclusion in the digital sphere. However, moving written scripts from the page on to the screen also requires multiple levels of technical policy, which represent layered challenges considering that digital architecture is designed around Latin script defaults and a capitalist consumption model that does not take into account the economics of the Majority World. This interview also explores the essential place of typography within the visual culture of language communities as well as the skills and intuition required of typographers as they design culturally appropriate fonts for scripts from unfamiliar contexts. This interview highlights the inspiration and the reflections of one of the most experienced typographers in the world, taking us in-depth into what it would really take for digital tools to enrich the communication ecosystems of all language communities.
This article investigates the invention of new writing systems, or “neographies”, and their uncertain trajectories in a digital age. It offers a working definition of neographies and surveys key themes in the literature: the motivations for script invention, factors influencing adoption, and the role of digital tools in enabling or impeding success. In particular, it attends to the difficulties of standardizing a script in a technical code when the script is still evolving and expanding, and the ways in which technologists have become involved in decisions about a script’s future. It uses the case study of the Adlam script, tracing its path from grassroots dissemination to Unicode encoding and subsequent refinements. The article concludes by outlining new directions for the study of neographies.
“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.
Both Indigenous researchers and Indigenous languages are under-represented in the emerging field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Michael Running Wolf, founder of Indigenous in AI, the Lakota AI Code Camp, and the First Languages AI Reality project (FLAIR), is working to change that. In this interview with communication scholar Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg, he shares his experiences building expectations of accountability among AI researchers working on Indigenous languages and what motivated him to train a new generation of Indigenous coders in rural South Dakota. He discusses his work to develop AI tools that support language learning in Indigenous communities across the full spectrum of North American languages that have co-evolved together. He also proposes nuanced, collective strategies to balance data sovereignty with digital access to Indigenous languages. Motivated by his desire to “build and rebuild the ecology of Indigenous thoughts”, Michael Running Wolf reflects on his multifaceted approach to changing the narrative for endangered Indigenous languages through AI that “creates speakers, not technologies”.
In this interview, Professor Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West (Harvard University Press, 2019) and From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech (MIT Press, 2024), sits down with communication scholar Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg to explore the impact of the “next billion users” on language diversity in the digital sphere. This wide-ranging conversation touches upon the role of youth in cultivating the vitality of minoritized languages in digital spaces, how aspirations impact language choices, how voice technologies shift power dynamics for digitally disadvantaged languages, and the “hidden” use of diverse languages beyond digital spaces researchers can access. The discussion also examines the ways in which language, metaphor and visual communication are leveraged, particularly by women, to navigate their personal freedom within highly surveilled digital spaces. The purity politics of language is addressed, including hybrid languages, online slang, emoji and the art of virality through fresh and flexible communication. Arora also dissects tech companies’ newfound concentration on “the next billion users”, and proposes that a consumer-focused approach to the Global South honours communities’ desire for quality services and is an effective route to serving their linguistic, cultural and social interests. Citing global solidarity, Arora rejects the idea that ethnographers are unable to authentically represent other cultures. Rather, she advises them to engage research participants as co-collaborators to avoid extractive patterns of knowledge development, while mapping the unique relations between the global and the local across humanity’s diverse contexts.
This article presents language reparation/reappropriation/reclamation/restoration, or language 4R for brevity’s sake, as a proposed mode of discourse dedicated to the roles of language in healthy constructions of African American identity. In many ways, African Americans are forced to grow, as legendary rapper and poet Tupac Shakur says, like roses from concrete. The initial historical tragedies of the Atlantic slave trade, further compounded by present realities of gentrification, mass incarceration and police brutality, form the concrete that estranges the African American community from complete self-actualization. This concrete blocks the critical evaluation and revitalization of identity roots. Language 4R, with the analysis of four correlative frameworks, aims to foster productive considerations of how language can help fortify these roots to break the concrete apart. Language reparation seeks to reconcile the worlds of institutional access and cultural acceptance through incorporating African American English (AAE) in school curricula. Language reappropriation points to African American Language (AAL) as a paramount assertion of African Americans’ diasporic identity. Language reclamation, as exhibited by creole languages such as Gullah, demonstrates an explicit intentionality in the maintenance of African roots in American soils. And finally, language restoration poses how genetic connection can incentivize the growth, development and fortification of new trans-Atlantic relationships, united through shared languages, terms and resources.
This article discusses testimonio as a narrative methodology to examine the dialectical tensions between people and digital tools, with a focus on people’s agency and capacity to “rewrite” or reshape the interests with which tools are originally designed and created. It also presents testimonio as a potential methodology to learn from the collective experiences of Indigenous Peoples through processes tied to language revitalization, collective memory, reconnection to Land and, ultimately, self-determination. The author reflects on the ethical commitments and limitations of non-Indigenous researchers collaborating with narrative methodologies and Indigenous Peoples, and the potential scope that testimonio offers to step away from common, technologically deterministic approaches that focus on the tools rather than people’s experiences and stories. The second part of the article includes two examples of testimonios: one by a Cree, Dene and Métis communicator, videogame designer and artist using digital technologies as tools for language revitalization, and another one by an Ayuujk communicator and community radio broadcaster who reflects on the power of radio for language revitalization, community organizing and the movements towards women’s rights.
Ongoing developments in natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) raise critical questions about linguistic bias and inequalities in datasets. Problematizing the concept of digital “inclusion” for linguistic vitality, this article addresses an adjacent research gap concerning dilemmas that are emerging from the increasing operability of globally marginalized languages with NLP and NLG technologies. We draw on our previous work on how Google Search “Autocomplete” algorithms interact with three languages indigenous to East Africa – Amharic, Kiswahili and Somali – each with their own historical, political and orthographic features that condition this automated interaction in complex and unpredictable ways. Highlighting different forms of harm that might result from the operation of predictive text in each language, we argue for the necessity of situating the algorithmic experiences of marginalized languages within specific historical, cultural and political contexts. From here, we consider the ways that the predictive logics of autocomplete have been expanding through the rapid intrusion of generative AI into the results of mainstream search engines. We grapple with the global implications of this rapidly changing AI information landscape and consider the potential impacts of such developments on linguistic contexts in East Africa and the dynamics of multi-scalar language inequality within and beyond the region.
In this article, I use quantitative sociophonetic data to shed light on the construction of identity in the context of Peruvian politics. Specifically, I analyse the dynamic vowel space of former Peruvian president Pedro Castillo within and across a set of discourse events. I situate this quantitative analysis within a framework of agentive, bricolage-like stylistic performance, analysing how Castillo recruits his vowels in the service of identity projects that rest on shifting degrees of (dis)alignment with two imagined communities that are salient in the Peruvian imaginary and which are constructed in opposition to one another: la sierra and la costa. I consider Castillo’s stylistic performance in relation to that of his second-round opponent in Peru’s 2021 elections, Keiko Fujimori, and ultimately identify two different ways that bricolage-like stylistic performance is engaged in here, which I propose to label contrastive mirroring and additive mirroring.
Language blind spots have hindered Facebook’s efforts to curb dangerous content, such as hate speech and calls for violence, during content moderation in Ethiopia. As a result, questions have emerged over whether – and to what extent – platforms such as Facebook support or undermine linguistic human rights (LHRs) in the country. This issue is especially pressing amid political violence and instability, as Facebook has applied mitigation measures unevenly, prioritizing English within a North American context while overlooking major Ethiopian languages. Approaches to remedying this gap must be delicate: while proactive takedown efforts are commendable in helping to stamp out dangerous content, inconsistent AI-based moderation of content without sufficient linguistic depth will trammel freedom of speech and LHRs in Ethiopia. This article seeks to examine the ways in which Facebook’s content moderation has floundered in the Ethiopian context due in part to language blind spots (and the lack of investment in methods to overcome these barriers), using three specific case studies from 2019–22. The article demonstrates that Facebook has shirked its due diligence duty in Ethiopia across all three case studies. As such, this article suggests that victims, civil societies, and human rights lawyers should consider suing Facebook (or Meta, Facebook’s parent company) before domestic and international tribunals as a result of the company’s complicity in fomenting atrocities in these three Ethiopian case studies.
This article reconstructs the emergence of the nineteenth-century Spanish novela marítima in the 1850s and 1860s as a means of uncovering the obscured history of the hydropoetic aesthetic that lies in counterpoint to the familiar geopoetic aesthetic underpinning the emergence of the post-imperial nation-state. Part 1 explores the introduction of the Anglo-French maritime novel into Spain, looking at the critical debates it inspired regarding the lack of an autochthonous novela marítima. Part 2 unpicks the imaginative labour of the first wave of Spanish sea fiction, from the idiosyncratic El marinero africano (1844) via El milano de los mares (1855) to the small but heavily marketed cluster of novelas marítimas that emerged in Spain in their wake: Los amigos de Simón (1860), Aventuras de Gilberto (1862) and El corsario negro (1863). The article explores the contrasting means by which each of these novels stakes its claim as being foundational to the articulation of a modern Spanish maritime literature that could draw productive meaning out of Spain’s declining global influence, loss of maritime supremacy and persistent attachment to the slave trade.
Early Zionism did not exist in a world exclusively composed of Wilsonian nation-states. Indeed, the centres of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian branches of the movement were both in multinational empires, as was their favoured destination of Ottoman-ruled Palestine. Rather, Zionism can be seen as a moment in the emergence of a world of nation-states when even the less likely candidates began to accept its assumptions. Prior to the certainty offered by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Zionists by necessity made contingency plans that compromised on both location and status. This meant that despite their religious, mythological and practical significance, they envisaged forms of success even without Palestine and full statehood. The perceived impossibility of the aims of Zionism was also consciously played up by Zionists, most notably the Viennese founder of the movement Theodor Herzl in his utopian novel Altneuland. Furthermore, Zionist writing anticipated various forms of success even without the physical inhabitation of territory, such as improvement in the perception, culture and even physique of Jews. Examining the national demand as a performative utterance as well as a means to acquire its object, this article argues that national demands also serve to constitute national identities and consolidate them, for both insiders and outsiders. Moreover, Herzl and others were aware of the constructed and publicly performative nature of nationhood in the same way we are today, characterising their own project as the construction of a national identity, in part through literature and performance. For performative national demands, as Arendt noted, means and ends are not distinct but are subsumed into momentum within a kind of discursive economy of competing nations, whether on the international stage or within a polity.
Domínguez, Saussy, and Villanueva have commented that “To think for too long about macaronics and creoles causes one to doubt that languages […] exist. Perhaps between any two languages there is a zone of mutual borrowing, a zone where translation is superfluous or always erroneous” (87). The Wave model of linguistic development proposed by Schuchardt and Schmidt suggests that we should understand languages not as discrete entities evolving through divergence from common ancestors, but as connected points on a spectrum stretching across the world. Like the people who speak them, languages are always in dialogue with each other as they develop through their interactions with the Other. This development through interaction often comes in the form of acts of non-translation as much as translation. We see this in the continuous historical exchange of loan words between languages, which sees a glacial non-translation gradually alter a language as new words and phrases are incorporated. It is partly for this reason that theorists such as Emily Apter have argued that non-translation has an even greater capacity to build bridges between languages, and thus people, than translation, as subjects are forced to engage with the foreign directly rather than experience it after it has been made familiar. This article explores two models for linguistic development (the Tree and Wave models) as well as currents in so-called “non-translation studies” through a close reading of “Thirteen Ways of Inhabiting a Language” (2019) by the Mexican poet-translator Juana Adcock. In particular, I argue that Adcock uses non-translation to demonstrate the extraordinary interconnectedness of languages and the impact this has on the way they develop and relate to one another. Ultimately, I conclude, in agreement with Domínguez et al., that the borders between languages (like many borders) are socially constructed and that embracing the entangled nature of human languages through non-translation can be immensely productive.
The process of translation generates exciting new possibilities through deep and prolonged engagement with the material of the source text; yet, as Lawrence Venuti has demonstrated, the creative agency that translators bring to the text has often been overlooked. The poet Caroline Bergvall explores translation’s crucial role in shaping literature, and this article links her practice to wider questions stemming from new materialist approaches to language. Two of her works are discussed here: “Via” (2004) consists of 47 different English translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Divina Commedia; Drift (2014), on the other hand, incorporates loose translations and rewritings of the Old English poem “The Seafarer”, the Norse poem “Hávamál” and the Icelandic Vinland Sagas. The resulting poems are not translations in the traditional sense, but they use their respective source materials as the basis of a citational and translingual mode of expression, thereby drawing attention to the importance of translation in the dissemination of languages and literatures. Nor do these works exist solely in one form; they have been published as text on the page, displayed visually and audibly in contemporary art spaces, and performed live by the poet herself. Drawing on both Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity and Michael Cronin’s work – inspired by Braidotti’s ideas – towards a nomadic theory of translation, this article will demonstrate how Bergvall’s creative (re)writing practice stages a nomadic encounter with a multiplicity of languages and media. Ever since Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari took nomadism as a model of thinking about the multiplicity of subjecthood, reformulating and revitalizing the poetic subject has often been associated with the minoritizing and deterritorializing effects of experimental writing practices. With these effects in mind, we shall see how “Via” and Drift effectively perform a nomadic encounter through Bergvall’s translingual approach to writing. By analysing her poetic practice alongside both Braidotti’s feminist philosophy and the cultural turn in translation theory, this article proposes that Bergvall’s hybrid approach to translation, writing and performance advances the ethical implications of contemporary translingual poetic practice.
This article aims to rethink Italian crime fiction by repositioning it in relation to intercultural and transnational processes of the production and consumption of cultural artefacts. More specifically, it focuses on how writers can use the crime genre as a powerful device to engage with current political debates about multiculturalism, minority rights and identity from an intercultural and transnational perspective. To this end, this article will discuss the representation of migration in Italian crime fiction over the last thirty years, and will then narrow down to the current Sino-Italian literary discourse. In particular, it focuses on Andrea Cotti’s crime novels Il cinese (2018) and L’impero di mezzo (2021), and the author’s attempt to provide a counter-narrative to a public Sino-Italian discourse in which cultural differences and distance have been essentially used to legitimise Italian superiority and justify the increasingly prevalent feeling of anxiety and paranoia towards the other in the Italian context. Drawing on intercultural hermeneutics and transnational studies, I argue that the author systematically keeps the narrative focus on first- and second-generation Sino-Italian characters, and uses comic relief and the intercultural as positive triggers. By doing so, this study argues, Cotti predominantly uses cultural differences in an attempt to put the emphasis on cultural exchange and reciprocal knowledge as the starting point for a fruitful and balanced intercultural dialogue. As a result, Cotti’s texts offer opportunities for creating new modes of agency, new strategies of recognition, and new forms of political and symbolic representation of the intercultural subject. It is also argued that valuable insights into literary objects and phenomena can be gained through a detailed analysis of the impact of intercultural elements on the reading process of Cotti’s crime novels. Through investigating, rhetorically, these elements’ ability to challenge the common Sino-Italian discourse and potentially change readers’ beliefs and attitudes in the real world, it is argued that these texts provide readers with an opportunity to develop an intercultural mind, which enables them to produce a more complex and thoughtful reflection and dialogue on the notion of Italianness and on issues such as structural violence, citizenship, identity, integration and in-between positions, as well as, more generally, the important role that cultural artefacts can play in intercultural and immigration public debates.
This article offers a corpus-assisted lexical semantic/semiotic analysis of the noun eresia “heresy” in contemporary written Italian. By adopting a qualitative and quantitative approach and drawing on the theoretical resources of both structuralist-inspired semiotics and poststructuralist/Peircean semiotics, this study reveals that eresia has a complex meaning spanning across religious and non-religious domains. Crucial is the idea of “deviation”, stretching into the intersubjective domain, where it marks interpersonal coordination by signalling communal common ground and extended intersubjectivity. This article also includes theoretical and methodological reflections on the role of collocations in the relatively young field of corpus-assisted semiotic analysis.
