Digital Language Equality: Definition, Metric, Dashboard

This chapter presents the concept of Digital Language Equality (DLE) that was at the heart of the European Language Equality (ELE) initiative, and describes the DLE Metric, which includes technological factors (TFs) and contextual factors (CFs): the former concern the availability of Language Resources and Technologies (LRTs) for the languages of Europe, based on the data included in the European Language Grid (ELG) catalogue, while the latter reflect the broader socio-economic contexts and ecosystems of the languages, as these determine the potential for LRT development. The chapter discusses related work, presents the DLE definition and describes how it was implemented through the DLE Metric, explaining how the TFs and CFs were quantified. The resulting scores of the DLE Metric for Europe’s languages can be visualised and compared through the interactive DLE dashboard, to monitor the progress towards DLE in Europe.