This linguistic hegemony is also evident in academia and technology. In 2022, approximately 95.9% of scientific publications indexed in Web of Science were in English. In Scopus, the figure was slightly lower, at 84%. Journals in local languages are increasingly less cited and considered, creating a linguistic feedback loop that marginalizes non-English scientific knowledge. A study in Germany found that around 30% of researchers chose not to publish their findings due to difficulties in writing academic articles in English. As a result, local-context knowledge remains regionally confined, limiting its contribution to global development.

Linguistic discrimination also manifests in national legal systems, particularly in former colonies in Africa and Asia, where English or French remain the official languages of the courts, often disregarding the local languages spoken daily by the population. In South Africa, for example, despite having eleven official languages, court practices still heavily depend on English and Afrikaans. A similar challenge occurs in Europe. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) operates only in English and French, although each member state has its own national language. This is in contrast to the Council of Europe’s policy since 1981, which emphasizes the importance of access to justice through languages understood by both defendants and victims.

Despite these challenges, some institutions have begun implementing reforms. The ICJ and ICC have expanded the use of professional interpreters and increased the number of translated documents. The European Union and Canada have developed legal mechanisms that recognize the equality of all language versions of a treaty. In the United States, the MacArthur Foundation advocates for the increase of bilingual personnel in legal institutions and public services. All of these efforts represent initial steps toward building a more linguistically inclusive legal system.

To achieve true global linguistic justice, broader structural changes are needed. International institutions must develop inclusive and flexible language policies, rather than limiting operations to two or three official languages. The right to understand and to be understood in legal proceedings must be considered a fundamental human right. AI-based legal translation technologies must be seriously developed to support more than the dominant few languages—such as English, Mandarin, or Spanish—and instead reach all of the 6,500+ languages spoken worldwide. Furthermore, scientific and academic publishing must promote bibliodiversity, the inclusion of diverse languages in knowledge production, so that local knowledge can be valued on a global scale.