Under the threat of "digital extinction" were many European languages
Last reviewed: 17.10.2021
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A team of 200 scientists from the organization META-NET, which unites 60 research centers from 34 countries, presented a report timed to the European Language Day (September 26).
Researchers examined and evaluated the ability of European languages to survive in the era of rapid development of information technology.
The results of the work of scientists fit in 30 volumes. The main factors on which the assessment was conducted were: speech recognition, grammar checking, the presence of machine translation systems and the availability of Internet resources in the corresponding language.
In the course of research, scientists came to the conclusion that of the 30 main European dialects, 21 does not have sufficient technological support. In particular, the lowest indicators in the areas studied were found in Latvian, Maltese, Lithuanian and Icelandic languages. In the "risk zone" of technological support are Greek, Bulgarian, Polish, Hungarian, Catalan and Basque languages.
English language, of course, beaten out in the undisputed leaders 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 languages have "moderate" technological support.
Experts were based on the fact that in the world of digital technologies, languages can not survive without adequate support, which provides machine processing of written and oral forms of language. It's about grammar, spelling, dialog systems, interactive helper programs, Internet search engines, and automatic translation systems.
"Technological language support makes our life easier and represents a huge potential for providing communication," experts say. "It's very important that technology 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 of a certain language.
If there is no such support, then the language is not in high demand in the modern digital world and can disappear altogether.