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Many European languages are at risk of digital extinction
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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A team of 200 experts from the META-NET organisation, which unites 60 research centres from 34 countries, presented a report to mark the European Day of Languages (26 September).
Researchers have examined and assessed the ability of European languages to survive in the era of rapid development of information technology.
The results of the scientists' work fit into 30 volumes. The main factors by which the assessment was carried out were: speech recognition, grammar checking, the presence of machine translation systems and the availability of Internet resources in the relevant language.
During the research, scientists came to the conclusion that out of 30 main European dialects, 21 do not have sufficient technological support. In particular, the lowest indicators in the studied areas were for Latvian, Maltese, Lithuanian and Icelandic. Greek, Bulgarian, Polish, Hungarian, Catalan and Basque are in the "risk zone" of technological support.
English, of course, has become the undisputed leader of the rating. However, despite the first positions, the authors of the study rated the technological support of the English language as “good”, but not “excellent”.
Italian, French, German and Spanish have "moderate" technological support.
The experts based their work on the fact that in the world of digital technologies, languages cannot survive without appropriate support that ensures machine processing of written and spoken forms of language. This includes grammar, spelling, dialogue systems, interactive assistant programs, Internet search engines, and automatic translation systems.
"Technological language support makes our lives easier and has enormous potential to provide communication links," experts say. "It is important that technological support tools are available for a wide range of languages and dialects."
The emphasis on technology makes sense because all digital systems rely on statistical methods, and to create them, you need to process a huge amount of oral and written information in a particular language.
If there is no such support, then the language is of little demand in the modern digital world and may disappear altogether.