Where Are Language-Specific Features Represented in Multilingual LLMs? Everywhere

Mikaela Martins, Jonathan Dunn

Previous work has argued that multilingual LLMs encode language-specific features most strongly in their initial and final layers, implying that intermediate layers support language-agnostic representations. This paper reconsiders this finding by performing four different experiments: three that undertake a fine-grained analysis of representations of Portuguese and Spanish, two closely related languages, and one large-scale language identification experiment that covers over 200 languages. The results of these experiments challenge the strict separation between language-specific and language-agnostic layers in multilingual LLMs, using Llama 3.2 1B as a test case. By analyzing and manipulating contextual sentence embeddings, we demonstrate that language identity remains strongly recoverable throughout the model rather than being restricted to initial and final layers. Moreover, we find that the model tends to classify ambiguous strings as closer to Spanish than to Portuguese, revealing a skew in model behavior that differs from human judgments.