Published July 15, 2026 | Version v1
Publication Open

Manifesto for Multilingual Digital Humanities

Authors/Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
  • 2. ROR icon NFDI4Memory
  • 3. ROR icon Central European University
  • 4. DARIAH-EU
  • 5. Reviews in DH
  • 6. ROR icon King's College London
  • 7. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
  • 8. ROR icon Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 9. ROR icon Huygens Institute for History and Culture of the Netherlands
  • 10. ROR icon University of Alicante
  • 11. ROR icon Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
  • 12. ROR icon University of Alberta
  • 13. ROR icon Johns Hopkins University
  • 14. ROR icon Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
  • 15. ROR icon University of Tsukuba
  • 16. ROR icon Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg
  • 17. Keio University
  • 18. International Insitute for Digital Humanities
  • 19. ROR icon University of Iceland
  • 20. University of Maryland
  • 21. ROR icon Freie Universität Berlin
  • 22. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz
  • 23. ROR icon New York University Abu Dhabi

Description

We, digital humanists of various linguistic backgrounds, have assembled the following manifesto based on our conviction that:

1.  Humanity is inherently multilingual.
2.  As social beings, we constantly face the challenge of not understanding each other and we therefore need to negotiate meaning and semantics depending on the specific context.
3.  All linguistic communities are equally important and both deserve their voice to be heard and their heritage to be preserved.
4.  We live in increasingly datafied societies and academic research is fundamentally mediated through information and communication technologies.
5.  Our networked knowledge ecologies are deeply steeped in asymmetric power-relations which culminate in the hegemony of the English language and Latin script to the detriment of all other linguistic and, in consequence, intellectual communities.
6.  Vast sections of our linguistic culture and heritage cannot currently be adequately recorded with digital tools.
7.  Digital monolingualism is only one of many intersectional dimensions of exclusion, discrimination, and bias in digital ecosystems.
8.  Digital monolingualism is entrenched in protocols and path dependencies. It needs to be constantly challenged with concrete, implementable steps on various levels.
9.  The digital humanities operate in the contact zone between technical affordances and humanist inquiry and are therefore particularly impoverished in their endeavour by the monolingual habitus of the tools and materials we depend on.

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