Most European languages are unlikely to survive in the digital age, according to a new study by META-NET, a European research network consisting of 60 research centres in 34 countries.
The report, released to coincide with European Languages Day on 26 September, had more than 200 experts assess technology support for 30 European languages under four headings: automatic translation; speech interaction; text analysis; and the availability of language resources for 30 European languages. The results showed that digital support for 21 of the 30 languages was categorised as either ‘non-existent’ or ‘weak’.
Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian and Maltese, received this lowest score in all four areas. Also on the high-risk list were Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Hungarian and Polish.
Irish scored ranked as weak in three categories, rising above the bottom of the table only in speech processing, where it recorded a score of ‘fragmentary support’.
No language was considered to have ‘excellent support’ across the board. Only English was assessed as having consistently ‘good support’, followed by Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish with ‘moderate support’.
"The results of our study are most alarming. The majority of European languages are severely under-resourced and some are almost completely neglected. In this sense, many of our languages are not yet future-proof," said Prof Hans Uszkoreit, coordinator of META-NET, scientific director at DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence).
Co-editor of the study Dr Georg Rehm said: "There are dramatic differences in language technology support between the various European languages and technology areas. The gap between ‘big’ and ‘small’ languages still keeps widening. We have to make sure that we equip all smaller and under-resourced languages with the needed base technologies, otherwise these languages are doomed to digital extinction."
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