LT coverage of European languages

Another Horizon 2020 project, META-NET, gathered data on LT support such as machine translation, speech processing, text analysis, and speech and text resources, for a range of languages, including lesser-used languages in both state and stateless frameworks. These data are essential for language processing and its online presence. The results show (see Figure 7) that not even English scores ‘excellent’ (a score of 16 or more) in LT support. Four lesser-used languages, all state languages, have weak or no support (score 4 to 6). A majority of languages have moderate or fragmentary support (8-11). Moreover, 21 out of 31 investigated languages are not supported by machine translation, and six of them (including five state languages) have weak or no speech and text resources (see Figure 5). This conclusion gives us a picture of the real danger of digital extinction for an estimated 80 % of European languages.