The ECSPM is one of 52 partners in a consortium of European organisations working towards the goal of digital language equality by 2030, on the basis of the European Language Equality (ELE) project which is a direct response to the resolution “Language equality in the digital age”, passed by the European Parliament in September 2018. The report provides more than 40 recommendations, including:

  • To establish a large-scale, long-term coordinated funding programme for research, development and innovation in the field of language technologies, at European, national and regional levels, tailored specifically to Europe’s needs and demands
  • To secure Europe’s leadership in language-centric Artificial Intelligence.

This ambitious endeavour stems from the findings of various studies and resolutions, showing that there is a striking imbalance in terms of digital language technologies across Europe with only a few languages (e.g., English, French and Spanish) being well supported. At the moment, more than 20 official languages and many more regional, minority and heritage languages are considered to be in danger of digital extinction. European language technologies have the potential to overcome this linguistic divide in the digital world. Therefore, the project’s mission is to create:

  • a sustainable evidence-based strategic research agenda
  • a roadmap, setting out actions, processes, tools and actors to achieve full digital language equality of all languages used within Europe (official or otherwise).

The ELE project, which started on 1 January 2021 and will end in June 2022, closely collaborates with the European Language Grid (ELG) that will strengthen the commercial European Language Technology landscape, offering powerful multilingual, cross-lingual and monolingual technologies, ELG will contribute to the emergence of a truly connected, language-crossing Multilingual Digital Single Market.

Both projects, about which one can find more information here, will organise a joint final conference, META-FORUM 2022, to be held in Brussels in June 2022.