Variation is the Norm: Embracing Sociolinguistics in NLP

In this paper, we extend FLORES+ with Portuguese-source evaluation sets for three Mozambican Bantu varieties: Xichangana, Mozambican Nyanja, and Sena. We compare Xichangana with the existing Tsonga reference and Mozambican Nyanja with Chichewa, and evaluate NLLB-200, Google Translate, GPT, and a variant-aware NLLB model. Holding system output fixed reveals substantial reference sensitivity. On devtest, changing only the reference from Tsonga to Xichangana reduces spBLEU by 13.10 points for NLLB-200 and 15.30 for Google. On matched Nyanja subsets, replacing Chichewa with Mozambican Nyanja produces smaller but consistent reductions of 3.03 and 6.10 spBLEU, respectively. Variant-aware fine-tuning reverses this pattern on the intended targets: relative to NLLB-200, it improves Xichangana by 7.04 spBLEU and Mozambican Nyanja by 5.33 on devtest, while losing performance on the sibling references. GPT is competitive on Tsonga and Chichewa but substantially weaker on the Mozambican varieties. For Sena, the finetuned model reaches 12.64 spBLEU and 36.21 chrF++ on devtest. These findings motivate variety-aware language identifiers, references, and reporting for cross-border languages or language dialects/variants. The data is publicly available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MOZNLP/FLORES_MOZ

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Ghana's 73 living indigenous languages remains deeply fragmented, under-resourced, and heavily skewed toward a single language. We present the first systematic review of the Ghanaian NLP landscape, screening 17,000+ publications across four academic databases to critically synthesize 36 core studies spanning datasets, model architectures, and evaluation paradigms. Our analysis exposes a severe resource imbalance: Twi-centric NLP has grown modestly, driven largely by religious-text alignment and crowdsourcing, while the remaining 70+ languages remain almost entirely unaddressed, and dataset releases, model checkpoints, and evaluation practices remain inconsistent and rarely shared across the field. We translate these findings into a prioritized roadmap targeting Ghana's acute regional constraints, dialectal variation, non-standardized orthographies, and the absence of shared infrastructure, offering a replicable template for systematic review and research prioritization in other low-resource language settings.

The design of Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been shown to be "unfair" to less-spoken languages (Petrov et al., 2023) and to deepen the digital language divide (Bella et al., 2023). Critical sociolinguistic work has also argued that these technologies are not only made possible by prior sociohistorical processes of linguistic standardisation, often grounded in European nationalist and colonial projects (Migge and Schneider, 2025), but also exacerbate epistemologies of language as "monolithic, monolingual, syntactically standardized systems of meaning" (Schneider, 2024, p. 5). In our paper, we draw on earlier work on the intersections of technology and language policy (Kelly-Holmes, 2019) and bring our respective expertise in critical sociolinguistics and computational linguistics to bear on an interrogation of these arguments. We take two different complexes of non-standard linguistic varieties in our respective repertoires-South Tyrolean dialects, which are widely used in informal communication in South Tyrol, Italy (Alber et al., 2024), as well as varieties of Kurdish-as starting points to an interdisciplinary exploration of the intersections between GenAI and linguistic variation and standardisation. We discuss both how LLMs can be made to deal with non-standard language from a technical perspective, and whether, when or how this can contribute to "democratic and decolonial digital and machine learning strategies" (Migge and Schneider, 2025, p. 12), which has direct policy implications.