Natural Language Processing (NLP) is revolutionizing smart manufacturing, turning piles of unstructured text, such as maintenance logs, incident reports, and operational notes, into clear, useful insights that power Industry 5.0. This chapter dives into how NLP is making manufacturing smarter, more efficient, and centered around people. We walk through the basics, from rule-based systems to today’s cutting-edge models like BERT and GPT, showing how they handle the vast amount of text data in modern manufacturing. Key applications are categorized into a taxonomy, including Human-Machine Interaction, Predictive Maintenance, Intelligent Robotics, Ontology-Driven Information Systems, and Patent Analysis, with real-world case studies illustrating their impact. We also get real about the hurdles, such as avoiding manual work, balancing speed with accuracy, and keeping up with ever-changing data, while pointing out where research can push things forward, and looking at how next-gen tools like Foundation Agents could make manufacturing even more seamless, sustainable, and human-friendly. Wrapping up, we provided two case studies that demonstrate how NLP can pull structured data from maintenance records and spot issues in manufacturing logs, delivering impressive results that save time and money.