Intergovernmental language policy for Dutch and the language and speech technology infrastructure
Gosse Bouma, Ineke Schuurman · 1998
The European Union has been actively stimulating fundamental and applied research on language and speech technology for more than a decade. A substantial number of European projects aimed at the development of resources and infrastructure. While the development of generalstandards and multilingual tools and resources are a concernof the European Union, the developmentof basic resourcesfor a given language needs to be stimulated by national initiatives as well. For Dutch – the language spoken in the Netherlands and Flanders – the ‘Nederlandse Taalunie ’ (Dutch Language Union) is a unique intergovernmental institution, responsible for language policy in both the Netherlands and Belgium. In this paper we investigate the state of affairs with respect to resources and infrastructure for Dutch and we address the question how national and intergovernmental language policy can stimulate the development of resources and infrastructure.