At the same time, access matters. Google Translate allows a doctor in Guwahati to explain a diagnosis to a patient from a remote village. It lets a diasporic Assamese youth reconnect with grandparents. That’s real.

Are we sacrificing depth for convenience? When a student copies Google-translated Assamese into a homework assignment, they’re not learning the language’s soul — the gendered verb endings, the rhythmic postpositions, the way elders speak vs. friends.

মোৰ ভাষাটো মই নিজেই ৰাখিম। (My language, I will keep it myself.) Would you like a shorter version, or one tailored for Facebook/LinkedIn/Instagram caption style?

What does that mean? Google’s Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) thrives on data. Billions of parallel sentences. For English–Assamese, the digital corpus is tiny compared to English–Hindi or English–Bengali.

Assamese (অসমীয়া) — a language spoken by over 15 million people, with a rich literary history from the 13th-century Bhakti movement to modern Sahitya Akademi award winners — is still a "low-resource language" in the world of machine translation.