A staggering 21 European languages are facing ‘digital extinction’, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Manchester’s National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and others from across the continent found that many languages struggle to be recognised in the digital world, on spelling and grammar checkers, on voice activated services such as Siri on the iPhone and automatic translation systems.

Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian and Maltese are at the highest risk of disappearing, while other languages such as Bulgarian, Greek, Hungarian and Polish are also at risk.

The study, prepared by more than 200 experts, assessed language technology support for each language in four different areas: automatic translation, speech interaction, text analysis and the availability of language resources.

Several languages, for example Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian and Maltese, receive this lowest score in all four areas.

While English has the best language technology support amongst all European languages, it can still not be considered as “excellent support”, but rather only “good support”, the University of Manchester researchers found.

Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish are considered to have “moderate support”. Languages such as Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Hungarian and Polish exhibit “fragmentary support”, which also places them in the set of high-risk languages.

The report concludes that a coordinated, large-scale effort has to be made in Europe to create the missing technologies and transfer this technology to the languages faced with digital extinction. More.

See: Huffington Post