The Common European Language Data Space (LDS) is an integral part of the EU data strategy, which aims at developing a single market for data. Its decentralised technical infrastructure and governance scheme are currently being developed by the LDS project, which also has dedicated tasks for proof-of-concept prototypes, handling legal aspects, raising awareness and promoting the LDS through events and social media channels. The LDS is part of a broader vision for establishing all necessary components to develop European large language models.

In our digital age, digital language equality is an important goal to enable participation in society for all citizens, independent of the language they speak. To assess the current state of play with regard to Europe’s languages, we developed, in the project European Language Equality, a metric for digital language equality that consists of two parts, technological and contextual (i.e., non-technological) factors. We present a metric for calculating the contextual factors for over 80 European languages. For each language, a score is calculated that reflects the broader context or socio-economic ecosystem of a language, which has, for a given language, a direct impact for technology and resource development; it is important to note, though, that Language Technologies and Resources related aspects are reflected by the technological factors. To reduce the vast number of potential contextual factors to an adequate number, five different configurations were calculated and evaluated with a panel of experts. The best results were achieved by a configuration in which 12 manually curated factors were included. In the factor selection process, attention was paid to data quality, automatic updatability, inclusion of data from different domains, and a balance between different data types. The evaluation shows that this specific configuration is stable for the official EU languages; while for regional and minority languages, as well as national non-official EU languages, there is room for improvement.