𝐍𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐚𝐧 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐢𝐧.

In 1863, French government figures reported that 8,381 of the country’s 37,510 communes did not speak French.

Breton, Occitan, Alsatian, Basque, Auvergnat and dozens of local patois (dialects) were still the ordinary working languages of everyday life.

Then school changed the economics.

Free, compulsory and genuinely useful, the republican classroom made French the language of education, mobility and opportunity.

The process was not benign. Regional languages were stigmatized, and children were sometimes shamed or punished for speaking them.

But coercion alone doesn’t explain what followed.

French became useful.

Parents had an obvious reason to send their children into a system where one language opened doors that the others increasingly did not.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described the mechanism: one form acquires legitimacy, and the others become accents, errors, then distant memories.

A language can lose its social function and disappear in just a few generations.

That got me thinking.

A significant and constantly growing proportion of professional writing and reasoning now travels through a handful of AI systems. Not by decree, but because they are useful and because the alternative is slower.

The analogy has limits. Languages and reasoning are different things, and history does not repeat that neatly.

But the mechanism is worth noticing.

The risk is not that AI tells people what to think. It is that organizations gradually outsource more to AI, because it’s efficient, and stop giving certain kinds of human judgment any work to do.

We are alert to imposition.

We have no antibodies for usefulness.

There is an encouraging second half to the story.

The Catalan language was pushed out of public life for decades under Franco’s Spain. Its recovery accelerated when Barcelona’s region, Catalonia, deliberately gave the language institutional work again: in schools, administration, media and public life.

The language made a come back because it was given a job.

Nothing survives because we admire it.

Things survive because they get used.

So here is a practical question for you:

𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐣𝐮𝐝𝐠𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐣𝐨𝐛 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞?

Your read on a difficult customer.
Your feel for an unreliable supplier.
The judgment call your industry punishes you for getting wrong.

If you can name it, keep giving it work.

If you can’t, that is the finding.

#AIStrategy #Leadership #DecisionMaking #CognitiveAttrition #AIGovernance

Contact

bruno.gentil@sherpaconsultingasia.com

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