European Language Equality: Introduction

Abstract This chapter provides an introduction to the EU-funded project European Language Equality (ELE). It motivates the project by taking a general look at multilingualism, especially with regard to the political equality of all languages in Europe. Since 2010, several projects and initiatives have developed the notion of utilising sophisticated language technologies to unlock and enable multilingualism technologically. However, despite a landmark resolution that was adopted by the European Parliament in 2018, no significant progress has been made. Together with the whole European LT community, and making use of a concerted community consultation process, the ELE project produced strategic recommendations that specify how to bring about full digital language equality in Europe and reach the scientific goal of Deep Natural Language Understanding by 2030, not only addressing but eventually solving the problem of digital inequality of Europe’s languages.