Digital Resources for the Languages in Ireland and Britain
CLARIN Knowledge Centre
Advice and support for users of digital language resources
Do you have a query about finding, access and using digital resources for the languages of Ireland and the UK? You can ask us!
Enquiries will be dealt with on a best-efforts basis by members of the CLARIN-UK consortium and researchers in Ireland, who have expertise in different languages, regions, resource types, technologies, etc.. It is intended that the scope should be wide and inclusive, including national languages and varieties, and other languages as spoken by communities in the UK. Queries should be sent to:
The CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Digital Resources for the Languages in Ireland and Britain, is a collaboration between CLARIN-UK and a network of researchers in Ireland, and it offers advice and support to researchers and others who want to find and use software programmes and digital datasets in the native languages of Britain and Ireland, in all their varieties, in contemporary and historic forms, as well as other languages as they are used in this region. The centre is virtual and distributed, with a central online presence and contact point. Information to orient and help users will be posted online, and queries will be responded to by a network of experts centred around the CLARIN-UK consortium, plus additional experts in key languages and domains, such as the Irish National Corpus project (see https://www.gaois.ie/en/about/info), and experts across Europe in the CLARIN network, and will also work closely with the Multilingual DH in the UK and Ireland Community Interest Group.
The centre aims to be a source of authoritative answers for questions like "Is there a semantic tagger for Welsh?", "How do I do OCR for Scottish Gaelic?", "Is there a corpus of Irish-language social media posts?", and "Is there an online dictionary for Old English?"
From October 2025 for six months the centre carried out a pilot project Unlocking AI for the Languages in Britain and Ireland, funded by UKRI, which aimed to improve access to general AI skills training for students and their teachers in the humanities, especially in the key area of the ethical use of language models, and will scoped potential improvements to the available digital resources for the lesser-resourced languages of the UK. The aim was lower the barriers to entry to AI-based learning, teaching and research in the humanities.
The centre received certification as a CLARIN Knowledge Centre in September 2024. Read more about CLARIN K-Centres here.
