THI’s 2026-2027 Theme

In the last few years, we have entered a strange new world of language technology, one where chatbots serve as therapists, advisors, clergy, and companions, and where it is increasingly unclear who — or what — is at the other end of an email exchange, video, or online comment. These technologies raise profound policy and ethical issues. At the same time, they foreground for all of us fundamental questions about the relationship between language and human experience that the humanities has wrestled with for millennia: What role does language play in how we think? What is unique and what is universal about human language? And how does language interact with systems of culture, history, and power?

As a social species, the languages we speak, write, and sign are the principal way we link minds to communicate meaning, convey our beliefs, and express our emotions. Language remains the most complex and complete system we have to share ideas, experiences, and stories. Through written language, we have created ways to communicate across vast tracts of time and space, enabling the consolidation of knowledge across generations. 

At the same time, language changes and evolves. Shaped by histories, beliefs, and traditions, languages can develop into dizzying variations, fingerprinting each and every one of us based on the groups and communities we belong to. This flux is one of the most fascinating — and challenging — aspects of studying the human experience: working to understand a text is less a case of decipherment and more an exercise in recentering, less communication of content and more communion with another perspective. Correspondingly, the analytical traditions of the humanities — close reading, archival studies, critical theorizing, logical analysis — all emphasize the centrality of an agentive, alert hearer/reader in interpretation. It is thus unsurprising that active reading and writing are so often viewed as the same as thinking, and that the capacity for language has been pointed to time and again as evidence for humanity’s unique status as a rational creature.

The growing linguistic capabilities of artificial intelligence technologies are forcing all of us to wrestle quite directly with our presumed uniqueness. At the same time, scholars studying other animals, plants, and forms of life have long emphasized the ways in which human language is part of a vast continuum of communication mechanisms organisms employ. AI technology is, in that context, the latest salvo against human exceptionalism. Similarly, the challenges AI systems raise about trust, equality, and bias are not wholly new: humans have misled and lied, mocked and judged, and policed and controlled each other’s language, all before the dawn of computing. In mirroring our linguistic talents, AI systems reflect back at us the uncomfortable ways we deploy language. 

Charting a path forward thus must involve critical awareness of our past and present, requiring the engaged, clear-eyed view the humanities cultivate. We can celebrate the ways language has enriched our lives and, at the same time, examine how it can be used to divide, exclude, and heighten inequalities. Language is a source of connection and identity, a form of cultural diversity, a record of history, a means of exercising power, and a way to transport us into other perspectives and imagined futures. And insofar as it is how so many of us create and evaluate complex arguments, it is deeply intertwined with how we think about thought itself, a sentiment that perspectives both old and new may force us to reevaluate. Join us as we focus on Language to explore what it means for our humanity, our connections, and our place in the world.