European Language Technology in 2022/2023

This chapter presents the results of an extensive empirical investigation of the digital readiness of European languages, and provides a snapshot of the support they are offered through technology as of 2022. The degree of digital readiness was assessed on the basis of the availability of language resources and technologies for each language under investigation and a cross-language comparison was performed. As a complementary approach, the perspectives and opinions of LT users, developers and the regular citizen were acquired in order to fully understand the EU’s LT landscape. Both the objective empirical findings and the voice of the community clearly indicate that there is an extreme imbalance across languages when it comes to the individual levels of technological support. Although the LT field as a whole has demonstrated remarkable progress during the last decade, this progress is not equally evidenced across all languages, posing, more acutely than ever before, a threat of digital extinction for many of Europe’s lesser supported languages.