R.L. Huang's "The Language of Liars" is an anthropological parable for our times. But in ways that exceed anthropology and linguistics. First, it is a clear indictment of colonization and appropriation and that, I think, was what Huang intended. Ro is a linguist from a small colony of vaguely mammalian creatures (the Ponto). He spends his days in formal linguistic study--as any grad student in linguistics might, with one exception: the Ponto's high level of empathy occasionally enables the most gifted linguists among them to "leap" into a host body, literally becoming the Other. At the top of the list for leaping: the most enigmatic species in the galaxy--the 'Star Eaters,' spherical, tentacled creatures with the ability to sense and interact with a hyperspatial element (meridian) that, Dune-like, enables the expansion of life across the galaxy.
In the midst of his grad student doubts about his own abilities and his purpose, Ro makes the leap into a Star Eater who toils in a meridian mining facility along with their fellow Star Eaters, all under the watchful eyes of pugilistic AI robots (the Overseers) and "the Conglomerate," a hyper-version of the British East India Company. Luckily for Ro, Star Eaters are prone to periods of dissociative amnesia, providing a handy deus ex mchina for Ro's leap into a Star Eater body. Accordingly, he makes many mistakes and needs to learn to mine meridian, among other social and cultural mores. All of his cultural missteps come to a head, however, when he discovers a stolen cache of meridian on the mining vessel, destroys its containment and then sets off a chain reaction that ports the mining ship several light years away. Brought before the Conglomerate at the inevitable hearing, Ro connects the dots from his time among the Star Eaters and draws the Far Side comic-ish conclusion--all of the Star Eaters have been replaced by linguists and there are no real Star Eaters left!
WE”RE ALL FROM OTHER WORLDS, AREN’T WE. Ro flung it forth before another order could be given, before any automaton could pounce. His words tripped over each other, a jerking thrash against the tableaux. THE MORPHOSYNTAX, LOOK AT THE MORPHOSYNTAX . . . .THE LOST INFLECTIONS, THE DISCOURSE MARKERS, NONE OF US ARE NATIVE SPEAKERS, TELL ME I’M WRONG, TELL ME I'M WRONG . . . (p. 138)
There are some bumps in this narrative road. For example, it's hard to sympathize with Ro (or anyone else) that would willingness extinguish the consciousness of another creature in order to replace it with their own. But, as a parable, it works great, and gestures to the extractive logic that unites both anthropology and capitalism.
There are some great moments. Ro's supervisor tells him, "we understand their culture perfectly” (p. 84), a veiled(?) reference to the hubris of early, twentieth-century ethnographers. Malinowski, after all, laid out the extractive imperative in his introduction to "Argonauts of the Western Pacific":
Though it may be given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his eyes look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him to be himself — yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our own world’s vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically.
As Vine Deloria, Jr. complains decades later, the cultural appropriation appears complete when indigenous peoples read anthropology in order to practice their own cultural beliefs: “Many Indians have come to parrot the ideas of anthropologists because it appears that the anthropologists know everything about Indian communities” (1988:82). Still, Franklin Hamilton Cushing aside, I'm not sure anthropologists really wanted to wholesale replace native peoples with themselves--although, as Rebecca Roanhorse writes in her short story, "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience" (2017), that certainly seems like the next step after "entering the soul" of the cultural other. In any case, there's plenty here to stimulate self-critique in anthropological worlds.
Actually, I find "The Language of Liars" to be a better parable for another form of cultural and linguistic extraction--generative AI. It's easy to see the appropriation here. Foundation models have been trained on massive data sets appropriated from our lives, the data that we continuously extrude as a byproduct of the digital surveillance state in which we live. And, of course, "low-resource" languages have also been sucked up into training data, albeit to a degree considered inadequate for model training. As with other attacks on data sovereignty, there are various forms of resistance to this wholesale appropriation.
Another source of danger, however, lies in the apparent fluency of LLMs--even in languages marginalized on the internet. That fluency--heir to decades of research in natural language processing--appears to seamlessly shift between source and target languages. While literary translation seems a reach for LLMs, it will still produce what some would find to be adequate translations, even if zero context is given in the prompt. This is not to minimize the many problems of low-resource translation in LLMs (Elsner, 2024). But the problems exceed questions of accuracy. As Barkin reveals in a recent essay, generative AI translation utilizes English as a pivot language, even when source and target languages are not in English. That is, the source language is translated into English, with the translation into the target taking place at a subsequent layer.
References
Barkin, Gareth. "EPISTEMOLOGICAL PERSISTENCE IN MULTILINGUAL AI: THE ILLUSION OF LOCALITY IN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS." INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MODERN SOCIOLOGY 51, no. 1-2 (2025).
Deloria, Vine. Custer died for your sins: An Indian manifesto. University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
Elsner, Micha. "Shortcomings of LLMs for Low-Resource Translation: Retrieval and Understanding are Both the Problem." In Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation, pp. 1332-1354. 2024.
Micha. "Shortcomings of LLMs for Low-Resource Translation: Retrieval and Understanding are Both the Problem." In Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation, pp. 1332-1354. 2024.
Zoli, Carlo, Greta Mazzaggio, and Neri Binazzi. "Small Codes: a platform for digital resources and tools for minority languages and dialects." In DIGITAL HERITAGE (2025), pp. 1-9. Eurographics-The European Association for Computer Graphics, 2025
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