Lost in the Tower of Babel: The Adverse Effects of Incidental Multilingualism in LLMs

arXiv:2605.01224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper argues that contemporary multilingual NLP has converged on a fragile and misleading paradigm of incidental multilingualism. Today's LLMs appear multilingual largely because they are trained on massive, uneven web corpora, not because multilingual or multicultural competence has been treated as a core design objective. We contend that this paradigm systematically produces unequal, brittle, and opaque behavior across languages, with severe...