Spektrum Iran

Semantic Sovereignty in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: The Persian Language, Meaning, and Cultural Self-Determination

Art des Dokuments : Original Research Papers

Autor

Assistenzprofessor für Medienkunst, Abteilung für Religionen und Medien, IRIB-Universität, Iran

10.22034/spektrum.2026.556925.1044
Abstrakt
The rapid proliferation of large language models and text-generative systems has precipitated not only technological transformation but also an epistemic reconfiguration of how meaning is produced and circulated. This paper diagnoses a specific risk facing Persian: the attenuation and potential displacement of its cultural-semantic horizon within globalized, predominantly English-language AI infrastructures. The objective is analytic and diagnostic: to delineate the conceptual grounds of 'semantic sovereignty' and to map the structural pathways through which contemporary AI practices endanger Persian meanings, metaphors, and hermeneutic traditions.

The study combines conceptual-philosophical analysis (philosophy of language, hermeneutics, phenomenology) with a critical reading of current AI training regimes and data ecologies. It employs analytic conceptual synthesis rather than empirical intervention: the analysis traces theoretical presuppositions (Wittgensteinian ‘meaning as use’, Gadamerian horizons, Davidsonian triangulation, Floridi’s information ethics) and maps them onto the material practices of dataset curation, model training, and platform mediation.

The paper identifies multiple, mutually reinforcing mechanisms by which AI systems produce semantic asymmetry: corpusic bias and representational scarcity; algorithmic translation that restructures non-English semantic networks into English-dominant vector spaces; infrastructural mediation that repositions Persian cultural artifacts as data-points divorced from their hermeneutic contexts; and epistemic filtering enacted by recommender and retrieval systems that privilege certain forms of explicability over opacity and singularity. Collectively these mechanisms instantiate what I term the ‘phenomenological extinction’ of a language’s world-disclosing power.

The phenomenon at stake is not mere lexical loss but an ontological impoverishment: a contraction of Persian’s capacity to disclose distinctive modes of being. Recognizing this risk requires conceptual clarity about semantic sovereignty as a diagnostic category. This paper stops short of prescribing remedial policies; instead, it aims to provide a rigorous philosophical staging of the problem so that subsequent scholarship and public discourse can assess the depth, modalities, and stakes of Persian’s semantic endangerment.

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