Cross-Lingual Bias in Large Language Models: A Comparative Analysis of English and Swahili
Large language models are increasingly deployed in multilingual contexts, yet safety alignment and bias evaluation remain overwhelmingly English-centric. We investigate whether social biases generalise across languages by submitting 4,900 symmetric English--Swahili prompt pairs to GPT-5.2 and Gemini 2.5 Flash across nine demographic bias axes, yielding 19,600 completions evaluated for stereotype prevalence, sentiment, refusal behaviour, and cross-lingual semantic similarity. Our findings show that bias transforms rather than transfers: stereotype rates shifted by up to 12 percentage points on specific axes, Gemini's neutral-sentiment rate doubled in Swahili, and GPT-5.2 refused 169 prompt...
| Authors | Ruolei Zhang, Teddy Njuguna, Yue Feng |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 August 2026 |
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