Fryslân Language Technology Research Lab

We are FLARESlab, a joint lab of the Fryske Akademy and Campus Fryslân (University of Groningen), both based in Leeuwarden (Ljouwert) in the province of Fryslân in the Netherlands. The Fryske Akademy brings decades of work documenting Frisian: corpora, dictionaries and linguistic research. Campus Fryslân brings research and teaching in speech and language technology, including speech recognition and synthesis for low-resource languages. Put together, that makes it possible to build working technology for the Frisian language. We made this website so people can find and use what both institutions have produced, and to make Frisian language technology more visible in Dutch and European research. We also want FLARESlab to be a place where ideas for other minority languages get tried out.

This initiative is primarily aimed at centralising and improving access to resources in the field of Frisian language technology. On this website, you can find speech corpora, tools, dictionaries and research outputs on Frisian, made by researchers and technical staff at the Fryske Akademy and Campus Fryslân. Material that used to be spread across several websites is now in one place, easier to find and free to use, whether you’re a researcher, a developer or simply curious about Frisian.

Yes. And yes.

Most of it comes from decades of documentation work. Since its founding in 1938, the Fryske Akademy has recorded and described the Frisian language and how it changes, first on paper and later digitally, building up large text corpora, dictionaries and datasets. Campus Fryslân adds speech data and models from its research on Frisian speech technology, including the recordings behind the Frisian synthetic voice. By bringing together the language technology expertise of researchers from the Fryske Akademy and Campus Fryslân, the province of Fryslân is becoming a global model for other regions where a minority language or a small language is spoken.