link | Digital Language Diversity Project (DLDP)

The mission of DLDP is to advance the sustainability of Europe’s regional and minority languages in the digital world by empowering their speakers with the knowledge and abilities to create and share content on digital devices using their indigenous languages.

In the short term, the immediate objectives of DLDP are the following:

Survey

A survey on digital use and usability of regional and minority languages, detailing actual digital linguistic diversity in Europe and, in particular, the digital fitness of four regional/minority languages spoken in Europe: Basque, Breton, Karelian in Finland, and Sardinian.

Training

A Europe-wide training programme targeted to regional and minority languages speakers to guide them towards effective production of digital content and language learning materials in their languages.

Kit

Strong, clear and actionable recommendations about what needs and can be done for a language “to go digital”: which are the challenges and difficulties, which areas need to be addressed first, which tools are available; the recommendations - named 'digital language survival kit' - will also contain a tool for self-assessing the digital fitness of languages other than those comprised in the case study.

Roadmap

A 'Roadmap to digital language diversity', aimed at stakeholders and policy makers, detailing the institutional and technological challenges as well as the proposed solutions for paving the way to a more widespread use of all European languages over digital devices.

The creation of intellectual and practical opportunities for creating digital content for regional and minority languages has many foreseeable benefits:

to contribute to increasing Europe's digital language diversity;

to encourage the birth of a global partnership (or “alliance”) of digital activists, content producers, technical people and policy makers for the design and development of an overall strategy that can help build a foundation for a new generation that will revitalize regional and minority languages;

to provide the necessary conditions for software developers, SMEs and industries to advance in the provision of state-of-the-art products and services allowing the use of regional and minority languages on digital devices (for instance: subtitling, localized interfaces for social media platforms, spelling correctors, keyboards, video games etc.);

to promote the use of indigenous languages in wider contexts and, indirectly, to their preservation and revitalization.

The DLDP project, supported by the EU Erasmus Plus programme, is led by Dr. Claudia Soria of the Institute of Computational Linguistics at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche based in Pisa, Italy. The DLDP partnership comprises the European Language Equality Network (ELEN), SNEB at the University of Mainz, the Basque organisation Elhuyar, and the Karelian Language Society.