# Culturally-Grounded Governance for Multilingual Language Models: Rights, Data Boundaries, and Accountable AI Design

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00497/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Closing the AI Accountability Gap: Defining an End-to-End Framework for Internal Algorithmic Auditing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00973/) (2020)
- [Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02446/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding and Mitigating Social Biases in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13219/) (2021)
- [MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/) (2023)
- [Multilingual LAMA: Investigating Knowledge in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00894/) (2021)
- [When Being Unseen from mBERT is just the Beginning: Handling New Languages With Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12858/) (2020)
- [XLM-T: Multilingual Language Models in Twitter for Sentiment Analysis and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12250/) (2021)
- [UNKs Everywhere: Adapting Multilingual Language Models to New Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15562/) (2020)
- [Tokenizer Choice For LLM Training: Negligible or Crucial?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08754/) (2023)
- [Don't Trust ChatGPT when Your Question is not in English: A Study of Multilingual Abilities and Types of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16339/) (2023)
- [The Language Barrier: Dissecting Safety Challenges of LLMs in Multilingual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13136/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multilingual Large Language Models: Corpora, Alignment, and Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00929/) (2024)
- [Feedback Loops With Language Models Drive In-Context Reward Hacking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06627/) (2024)
- [Multilingual LLMs are Better Cross-lingual In-context Learners with Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05940/) (2023)
- [LLMs Are Few-Shot In-Context Low-Resource Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16512/) (2024)
- [Monolingual or Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Which Makes a Better Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08958/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Large Language Model: A Survey of Resources, Taxonomy and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04925/) (2024)
- [SERENGETI: Massively Multilingual Language Models for Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10785/) (2022)
- [Institutionalising Ethics in AI through Broader Impact Requirements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11039/) (2021)
- [Simple LLM Prompting is State-of-the-Art for Robust and Multilingual Dialogue Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16797/) (2023)
- [One Law, Many Languages: Benchmarking Multilingual Legal Reasoning for Judicial Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09237/) (2023)
- [adaptMLLM: Fine-Tuning Multilingual Language Models on Low-Resource Languages with Integrated LLM Playgrounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02370/) (2024)
- [Multilingual and Fully Non-Autoregressive ASR with Large Language Model Fusion: A Comprehensive Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12789/) (2024)
- [Artificial Intelligence Ethics: An Inclusive Global Discourse?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09959/) (2021)
- [FATE in AI: Towards Algorithmic Inclusivity and Accessibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01590/) (2023)
- [Bridging Deliberative Democracy and Deployment of Societal-Scale Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10831/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed across cultural, linguistic, and political contexts, yet existing governance frameworks largely assume English-centric data, homogeneous user populations, and abstract notions of fairness. This creates systematic risks for low-resource languages and culturally marginalized communities, where data practices, model behavior, and accountability mechanisms often fail to align with local norms, rights, and expectations. Drawing on cross-cultural perspectives in human-centered computing and AI governance, this paper synthesizes existing evidence on multilingual model behavior, data asymmetries, and sociotechnical harm, and articulates a culturally grounded governance framework for MLLMs. We identify three interrelated governance challenges: cultural and linguistic inequities in training data and evaluation practices, misalignment between global deployment and locally situated norms, values, and power structures, and limited accountability mechanisms for addressing harms experienced by marginalized language communities. Rather than proposing new technical benchmarks, we contribute a conceptual agenda that reframes multilingual AI governance as a sociocultural and rights based problem. We outline design and policy implications for data stewardship, transparency, and participatory accountability, and argue that culturally grounded governance is essential for ensuring that multilingual language models do not reproduce existing global inequalities under the guise of scale and neutrality.