Pedro Mercado addresses challenges and opportunities in consolidating Spanish as an academic and scientific language in the current digital ecosystem
Yesterday, at an event held at the Panamanian Academy of Language, the Rector of the University of Granada, Pedro Mercado, delivered a speech dedicated to the role of Spanish as an academic and scientific language in the new ecosystem shaped by artificial intelligence. During his speech, Prof. Mercado cautioned that current technological developments are “built on significant linguistic asymmetry that limits the potential of Spanish to generate specialised knowledge”, pointing out that more than 90% of the texts used to train AI models are written in English.
He noted that this situation directly affects the generation and transfer of knowledge, and that the scarcity of scientific corpora in Spanish is one of the main obstacles to achieving digital language equality. “If we want AI to be able to reason and generate science in Spanish, then it needs sufficient high-quality raw material,” he added. In this vein, he emphasised the importance of fostering projects that focus on data collection, terminology standardisation, and the development of technological infrastructures that do not depend exclusively on major international corporations.
Prof. Mercado also discussed the impact of this linguistic gap on science communication. He pointed out that the predominance of English in high-impact journals limits the visibility of Spanish as a language of academic prestige and hinders the creation of new words to describe new scientific advances. “A language that fails to name its scientific advances is vulnerable,” he added, referring to the loss of lexical domains in technical and scientific disciplines.
Furthermore, the Rector addressed other important issues during his speech, including:
- The need to reduce dependence on technological infrastructures outside the Ibero-American sphere;
- The risk that a lack of investment in language technologies will exacerbate the digital divide between regions;
- The importance of protecting cultural diversity and the varieties of Spanish in AI environments;
- The role of universities in creating new specialised lexicons;
- The benefits of strengthening alliances between pan-Hispanic institutions to share computing and data resources;
- The need to support these advances with regulatory frameworks and ethical standards that guarantee inclusive technological development.
In his speech, Prof. Mercado highlighted several initiatives currently underway in the Ibero-American sphere, such as the development of language models specifically trained for Spanish, as well as projects aimed at creating interoperable, pan-Hispanic terminology repositories. He also emphasised the role that universities must play in promoting AI capable of generating original content in Spanish, rather than merely translating from English.
Additionally, Prof. Mercado outlined the main action areas included in the University of Granada’s Spanish Strategy (2025-2031), which was recently approved by its Governing Council. In this regard, the UGR is currently collaborating with Hispanic-American institutions to create standardised scientific corpora, consolidate language policies to boost the global reach of Spanish, and develop technological resources to foster the use of Spanish in academia and specialised digital environments.
The speech concluded with an invitation for the University of Panama and the Panamanian Academy of Language to sign the ‘Granada Declaration on the Development, Communication and Dissemination of Science in Spanish’. According to the Rector, the aim of this declaration is to ensure that Spanish takes its rightful place in contemporary science and technology.
Translated version: This text has been translated into English by the Language Services Unit (Vice-Rectorate for Internationalization) of the University of Granada.