More than 20 years have passed already, but Georg Steiner’s critique in 1998 about "Computers and databanks chatter in 'dialects' of an Anglo-American mother tongue" is still to be found a valid description of the digital monolingualism and power structures of the majority of research infrastructures in the world. Through this, English language hegemony not only poses a barrier for global academia's exchange in the digital age in general (e.g. lacking discoverability of and access to research in non-Anglophone languages and non-Latin scripts), but has also been accounted for producing cultural and technological biases in the humanities disciplines' prospering scholarly field of "Digital Humanities." Of special concern here is digital scholarship in and about non-Latin-scripts (NLS) as software, information systems and infrastructure allow for the use of NLS only to a limited extent or often not at all. Furthermore, because of the project character of much of NLS DH research, sustainability of both, technological solutions and staff expertise, is not secured. 

In our talk we will address the topic of "digital monolingualism" from a research librarian’s point of view aiming at rising awareness to this important field of action for digital knowledge infrastructure development for the (not only digital) humanities in general and for the field of area studies in particular. With the example of NLS DH we first highlight requirements for multilingually enabled DH infrastructures identified through recent workshops and community building activities. 

Drawing on experiences from the ongoing Change-management project "Wandel@FUBib" at the Freie Universität Berlin university library and from membership in the LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group we would then like to initiate a discussion on library-faculty collaboration in co-designing research infrastructures more broadly as well as with a special consideration of co-designing sustainable DH infrastructures.