For those curious, the 24 official languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language.
Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are the three Uralic languages.
All the others are Indo-European, Greek being the only Hellenic one, Irish the only Celtic, the rest are Baltic, Slavic, Italic, or Germanic.
(I originally used the term Balto-Slavic, though I was unaware of some of the connotations of that term until just now. Baltic and Slavic do share a common origin, but that was a very very long time ago)
Arabic, even. An outlier, as it is AFAIK the only arabic dialect that is not written with the arabic alphabet. Also it's far removed from other arabic dialects.
Maltese isn’t an Arabic dialect. Yes, the grammar and phonology and core function words derive from Arabic, but more than half of the vocabulary comes from Italian/Sicilian-North African Arabic may borrow a few words from Italian here and there (just like English does), but not >50% of their vocabulary.
I think the family tree model of linguistic history is not very useful for English. Saying English is Germanic to the exclusion of everything else is not very useful.
The family tree model seems to assume that every language has only 1 direct ancestor. It seems to have been inspired by phylogenetic trees in biology. In phylogenetics, single-parent trees work fine because distantly related species can't breed with one other. By contrast, different languages borrow features from one another all the time. It could perhaps be useful for some languages, but not for English. I reckon.
Can’t read the Hebrew alphabet, but transliterated to Latin: “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot” - I find it fascinating that despite knowing close to zero Yiddish, it makes complete sense.. well, I know a handful of German words (which covers “mit”)… and “flot” contextually makes sense as “navy”, especially if one knows English “flotsam and jetsam” (not navy but at least nautical)
It's not at all far removed from the North African dialects of arabic which is the dialect that it's derived from. Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
> Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
Not in my experience. Not at all actually. My experience with Arabic speakers is that they think they're understanding when you speak Maltese, because it sounds kind of familiar, but in actual fact they're not understanding much at all.
Which is not surprising after a thousand years of divergence.
Oh, stop it! What are you really trying to say? 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim. Ask yourself: what is the advantage of a language over a dialect or vice versa? Why are you fighting for it (or against it)?
Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.
>'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim
It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.
>Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.
That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
> > 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim
> It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.
It's both. The idea that Ukrainian is an uneducated farmer's dialect of Russian is a common talking point in the "Greater Russia / Russkiy Mir" narrative. Conversely, asserting the status of the Ukrainian language is a big part of Ukrainian identity in the face of an imperial invasion.
> That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact. Although you can sometimes find typological criteria to further argue that a variety is a language on its own, for example there are good grammatical reasons for not counting Swiss German as a variety of German, you will also find examples the other way around where two varieties have large lexical and grammatical differences and still count as the same language.
The strongest criteria for what counts as a language are based on language origins (as opposed to typology), and these do not generally suffice or make meaningful distinctions to varieties (~dialects). Mutual comprehensibility can be very low for speakers of the same language, which is why most research focuses on varieties or on speaker groups that are of particular sociolinguistic interest.
I don't get why you talk about "academic linguistics" as if there was a non-academic one and why you think linguistics "had to pay lip service into several ideologies." What are you talking about?
It's simple: linguistics is a politicized discipline, and there's a prevailing ideogically motivated tendency to put every language and dialect on equal footing.
>As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact.
Yes, this ideologically motivated idea after enough repetitionbecame "a fact" of the field, as if describing some objective physical law, and even non-political students will be taught and stick to the same (and anybody with a dissenting opinion will be getting an earful if not committing career suicide).
This wasn't always the case, it's more so with liberalism prevailing, especially in the latter half of the 20th century.
What relevance does that have? I'd say it's more important to acknowledge the fact that there are zero Irish speakers who don't also speak English. Including it as an official EU language is an ideological project rather than a pragmatic one.
Because there is a cause to revert the intentional damage done to Irish by the former rulers of the land. With Frisian there was no resistance to it. I think official language status helps provide resources to conservationists of various languages. And trying to conserve a language most of the speakers don't care about us a lot different than trying to conserve a language people do care about but we're forced to suppress for many years so have less ability to conserve it
Irish is an official language of Ireland (there is signage and instructions in Irish up and down the Republic) , Frisian is not an official language of the Netherlands to the best of my knowledge
Irish is certainly not a robust vigorous language but your 40,000-80,000 numbers downplay it I'd suggest. Here are some statistics from Deepseek
Category Region Number of Speakers Source & Year
Some Ability Republic of Ireland 1,873,997 (40% of population) 2022 Census
Some Ability Northern Ireland 228,600 (12.4% of population) 2021 Census
Daily Speakers Republic of Ireland 71,968 2022 Census
Daily Speakers Northern Ireland 43,557 2021 Census
Native/Fluent Global Estimate ~80,000-170,000 Various Sources
Speakers U.S. United States ~20,000+ Estimate
Nothing against Irish as a language at all - I am just pointing out far more people learn Frisian as their mother tongue.
Whereas Irish seems to be heavily promoted but for whatever reason precious few people learn it as their mother tongue, and those who do so are primarily in an area where it’s always been that way. For better or worse, people are preferring to use English at home and Irish is treated like a luxury good.
Correct. Frisia (or Fryslân) is a bilingual province. Frisian is an official language of the Netherlands. Someone called in front of a judge in the north of the Netherlands has the right to be heard in Frisian, for example.
Fun fact: villages, towns, and cities in Frisia often have names which differ in Frisian and Dutch. In those cases the signs at the place limits will have both names listed; the official one on top (which in some cases is the Dutch name (e.g., Leeuwarden/Ljouwert) and in some cases the Frisian (e.g., Gytsjerk/Giekerk)).
I really like that the intercom announcement voice in our trains (and also buses?) is bilingual.
And huh interesting, I didn't know that for some places with bilingual names, the Dutch name is official and for others the Frysian is? Who gets to decide that, the municipality?
Yep, the municipality decides on such matters. Places do still occasionally have their names changed (rarely of course, because it involves a lot of work including updating addresses), usually aligning with local use. In the case of De Westereen a name from the local dialect replaced both the Dutch and Frisian names (Zwaagwesteinde and Westerein, respectively).
In a number of cases originally Frisian names actually supplanted older Dutch names (e.g., Burgum, Grou, Eastermar, etc.), so those places have just one name in both languages (except on the Dutch language Wikipedia because of weird reasoning about allowable sources and apparently a hatred of Frisianised Dutch names).
I dunno about the situation with the languages of Italy, from a cursory glance at Wikipedia it seems a _lot_ more complicated than Frysian/Dutch in NL, so I really don't think it's anything "like saying" that.
But "official" means exactly what it means, and when I'm saying "Frysian is an official language of the Netherlands", it means that it's recognized as an official language of Netherlands, by the Dutch government. And if it was up to the provinces I dunno, but it's not. Frysian is the one that's considered one of the official languages of the Netherlands.
I also don't think comparing to Italy makes sense at all because countries are different and decide what are their official languages for very different historical reasons. For instance you can look up what Dutch government body is responsible for deciding the Frysian language is an official one in the Netherlands and why, and you will very likely find no Italian equivalent of that.
It's not really that difficult, an official language OF a country is recognized at a national level. Thus all official government communication must be issued in that language. In the Netherlands, only Dutch has that level of recognition. Same in Italy for Italian
Then there are other, regionally-rocognized language that local governments use alongside the national one (West Frysian in Friesland, German in South Tyrol, etc.), and may even enjoy a majority of speakers within those regions, but they are not "an official language OF" the wider country.
in response to: “what language is the Constitution of the Netherlands written in?”
Deepseek answers with, “The Constitution of the Netherlands is written in Dutch.
Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands and the language used for all primary government and legal documents, including the Constitution (Grondwet).
Key Context:
Official Language: Dutch is the sole official language for national governance.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands: It's worth noting that the Kingdom of the Netherlands also includes the Caribbean countries of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. While they have their own official languages (Papiamento and English), the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which governs the relationship between these countries, is also originally written in Dutch.
No Multilingual Version: Unlike some countries (e.g., Canada, Belgium, or Switzerland), the Netherlands does not have an official, legally equivalent version of its Constitution in any other language.
Therefore, the authoritative and legally binding text of the Constitution exists only in Dutch.”
Frisian may be an official regional language but you're not going to convince me that it's an official language of the Netherlands. Love that I'm getting downvotes about this.
The Constitution of Ireland is written in Irish and English and to the best of my knowledge where differences arise the Irish one takes precedence.
As a Brit I feel very at home when hearing/reading Dutch and Frisian. It’s a reminder that England and the Low Countries share a lot of close history all the way back to Anglo-Saxon times; of being fishers, traders, burghers and mercenaries moving around the North Sea chasing opportunities, spreading and augmenting languages.
“Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk”
That’s because all those languages are all essentially rooted in the languages/dialects of the Germanic tribes. It is why the Dutch get their English name from the German for German, Deutsch; and Nederland (Neder = Low) is German/Dutch for the Lowland Deutsch.
I’m sure everyone is aware that English comes from Anglish, i.e., the Angles as in the Germanic tribe.
Deutsch is derived from proto-germanic (as best we can tell) þiudiskaz, meaning “the people” i.e., the group of the different self associating tribes. It gets far more interesting in that it seems many of the strong dialects of especially southern Germany, Austria, and England have in fact retained some very old words and pronunciations that were lost in more standardized, conformed, and perverted dialects.
Not only on the language but also in gastronomy and architecture. When I see old towns in UK I usually think about Dutch towns but just without any biking infrastructure.
Dialect of Liverpool is called scouse, after a popular local dish -> lobscouse/Labskaus is very popular (love/hate really) in northern Germany as well.
> However modern standard Dutch (Nederlands, Hollands) is based upon Franconian, rather than Saxon dialects.
> Some of these [Old Saxon] speakers took part in the Germanic conquest of England in the fifth century AD. While it is not true that English and Plattdeutsch derive completely from the same source, the Old Saxon input into Anglo-Saxon was of primary importance and this linguistic group contributed greatly to the Anglo-Saxon dialects which our English forefathers spoke.
Old English and Old Norse are mutually intelligible (especially after you realize the precise correspondences like un- = o-). Gunnlaugs Saga explicitly says the English and Norse are of one tongue and features a Norse poet singing to an English king. As another example, Ohthere of Hålogaland (Norway) visited King Alfred's 9th century English court and simply spoke to them in his own language:
> Whoever preserved this story was also curious about Ohthere’s descriptions of where the Angles had lived ‘before they came into this land’ (England). Members of Alfred's court remembered that their ancestors came from mainland Europe, and they wanted to learn more about the lands which they identified as their own places of origin.
The scribe explicitly wrote things like "he said krán which we call crein" showing they were speaking in their own languages. It's even clearer if you consider our standard Old English is West Saxon from 850 and our standard Old Norse is from 1250 in Iceland (more different than the Danish variety of most Scandinavians in England). At the same time point,they would have more similarities (8th century Danish had wír before w turned to v).
Anglo-Saxons not Dutch. But the short answer is yes. The word Welsh is derived from the Old English word for foreigner.
Latin would have been spoken in towns and cities but as Roman rule collapsed it was replaced by Brittonic (ancestor of Welsh), unlike in the continent where it developed into various Latin derived Romance languages.
Dutch is funny - when I hear people speaking Dutch I almost feel like I should be able to understand it (but clearly as I've never learnt it, I can't).
The cadence and general way it sounds is much closer to English than any other language
They're children were taught in schools that ensured that they learned English but many adult immigrants never learned to speak English. Carnegie Steel used to try to avoid having too many workers with a common language as part of a strategy to make unionization more difficult. And when Norman Borlaug was growing up in
Saude, Iowa in the 1920s there were still a lot of older people around who only spoke Norweigen.
This raises an interesting question. Is there only one dialect of German in the LLM? My understanding is that the German German and Austrian German dialects are significantly different.
My German teacher always claimed that Swiss German and German German (Hochdeutsch) were so different that she needed subtitles to understand it, and she didn't understand why they weren't considered separate languages.
It depends. There is not one Swiss German but multiple subdialects. The language spoke around the Bern region very far away from German while the one from Zürich or Basel is much closer. Since there is no official written from they never really converged to a homogeneous language.
This sort of thing always makes me think of the English my grandmother from the foothills of the Appalachian mountains spoke. It vas very distinct from standard American English.
They really are very, very different. Knowledge of one helps with the other, but it's far more than just "a couple of weeks to adjust to the accent", for example.
EDIT: It's worth noting that this is mostly a spoken thing, AIUI - most formal/semi-formal writing would be in Hochdetusch rather than a local dialect.
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I'm specifically talking about colloquial Swiss German -- which is, I assume, what you mean by "the dialects" -- and not about Swiss Standard German, which is indeed very similar to German Standard German and can't be considered a different language.
Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, unless the latter switches to standard German (which is a foreign language for them, though one they have to learn from age 6).
> Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, unless the latter switches to standard German (which is a foreign language for them, though one they have to learn from age 6).
I presume they also pick up a lot of standard German in the media: there's lots of German movies, and Germany has the biggest movie dubbing industry in the world, too. There's some Swiss German media, but not nearly as much as there's on offer in standard German.
Some Chinese dialects are a lot further apart than eg English and German. They are mostly called 'Chinese dialects' rather than languages for political reasons. Gotta project that unity.
This, but with something oddly french about it, at least in the way it sounds.
As a native french speaker, no other language gives me that "why don't I understand what they say... oh, right, that's not my language!" feeling. Something with frequencies used, I suppose, but it always puzzles me.
When spoken? Almost certainly. But I think they mostly write in Hochdeutsch, especially in formal contexts, at least that I've seen (private chats/etc are a totally different matter), so I don't foresee any major issues there.
Austrian standard german is slightly different from the German variant, even when written. The differences are pretty minor, though, so it’s very possible to have a relatively long text without being able to tell which one it actually is (especially when potatoes are not referenced in it).
Well, even without any government mandates, ChatGPT is very happy to give you lots of dialects of English (and many other languages, too). Just ask for it.
Eg it does a passable impression of Singapore's Singlish.
Not a native, but from what I understand, austrian german is pretty similar to what is spoken in southern Germany, but northern germany is significantly different.
Is English a legacy official language then from the time the UK was a member (I‘m guessing Ireland nominated Irish instead of English). Aside it feels very un-EU to push this limitation, as I was under the assumption that EU was all about celebrating (European) diversity.
The history here is more complex than that… originally Irish was not an EU language because Ireland just used English… then as part of one the cycles of EU treaty renegotiation, Ireland successfully pushed for it to be made a secondary EU language… and then later successfully pushed for it to be upgraded to full status… so Ireland actually has two EU languages, their original one (English) and their newer one (Irish). Because the practical reality is everyone in Ireland is fluent in English-around 60% of Irish people can’t even speak basic Irish, and fluent Irish speakers is <10% of the population
Also, English remains one of the main working languages of the EU bureaucracy, because for many EU states (especially in Eastern Europe) it is a more popular foreign language than the other two (French and German)-when Czech diplomats need to talk to Spanish diplomats, English is the language they choose.
This idea people have here that “each country gets to nominate a language” isn’t how it actually works. The treaties just contain a list of languages, and which languages are in the list is down to diplomatic negotiations not any coherent principle.
Well I can only assume that when UK departed the EU, English wasn't removed automatically even though no country remaining in the EU nominates it as their official language of choice.
The UK was not a founding member of the EEC which preceded it, I don't know and haven't easily been able to find out, but it wouldn't be that surprising if the European Parliament already used English as a common language for policy etc.
(In fact to strengthen that probability, if it had been say French, when and why would it have switched go English? Just because the UK joined?)
Including the nasty political side-show that is Ulster Scots - literally only brought in as a chilling effect 'whataboutism' to diminish support when Irish speakers ask for language rights in Northern Ireland.
Well Scots is a real language. As much as English or any other. Whether enough people speak it especially in NI to justify it having an official status and such is another matter.
This is one of those topics where the Hacker News take is unlikely to be correct. There's a lot of strong feeling here, and an outsider would need at least three books to understand the historical context (one of which, afaict, has not been written yet: it's oral tradition only).
People closer to the issue are better-placed to gather the necessary information, but again: strong feeling. Most people find it hard to get past that. The most informed person I know is so biased that I don't at all trust their conclusions.
Part of the issue some people take with Ulster-Scots is that the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature, which English speakers can easily read and understand. It's often made up of slang terms and archaic spelling, in an attempt to be as different as possible to English. Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them.
> the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature
Does modern English read like historical English?
> Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them.
Sure, there are tonnes of issues with the "officialisation" of any language but the fact that there are "native speakers" involved in the debate strongly suggests it wasn't all just made up for political reasons, which was the point I was responding to.
>Does modern English read like historical English?
If you can read and understand text from the 18th century, then yes. We're not talking about Middle English or Old English.
>but the fact that there are "native speakers" involved in the debate
I should have put native speakers in quotes as well. What counts as a native Ulster Scots speaker is someone who speaks English with an NI accent with some localisms thrown in.
Nobody speaks the official Ulster Scots that was invented because the Irish language was getting support and political leaders on the other side of the community felt they deserved something as well. The Protestant community in NI see it as a bit of an embarrassment.
> If you can read and understand text from the 18th century, then yes.
Yes, and I can read and understand historical Ulster Scots as well, but you were making a different point about codification/drift, no? The English I would find in those historical writings is quite different from what is being taught in schools today or recommended in style guides.
> What counts as a native Ulster Scots speaker is someone who speaks English with an NI accent with some localisms thrown in.
Then by your definition I am a native speaker. So how can we square it that you're telling me native speakers feel one way while I feel another way?
> Nobody speaks the official Ulster Scots
That's the nature of any newly codified minority language.
> The Protestant community in NI see it as a bit of an embarrassment.
There is no "protestant community" in Northern Ireland. A Dungannon farmer, an East Belfast loyalist and a BT9 lecturer will all give you very different views despite being of protestant background.
My point regarding the "official" language is that it bears little resemblance to the dialect that largely died out in the 20th century. i.e. it's a fabrication. Contrast that with the differing dialects of Irish where the grammar is identical with some variations in pronunciation.
I'm not entertaining the notion that I have to pretend you're a native speaker when you've made clear you're only identifying as such for the purpose of making an argument.
>There is no "protestant community" in Northern Ireland.
Anyone who applies for a job in NI fills out a form where they are asked if they are a member of "the Protestant community", "the Roman Catholic community" or neither. You're denying the factual existence of the different communities in NI for the purpose of winning an argument on the internet.
> My point regarding the "official" language is that it bears little resemblance to the dialect that largely died out in the 20th century i.e. it's a fabrication
Could you outline the key ways in which it differs? And say why that suggests the language was later "fabricated?"
> I'm not entertaining the notion that I have to pretend you're a native speaker when you've made clear you're only identifying as such for the purpose of making an argument.
If you won't entertain the notion that I'm a native speaker could you amend your definition of "native speaker" or explain what differentiates me from the native speakers whose complaints you referenced previously? And could you let us know where we can read about their complaints?
> Anyone who applies for a job in NI fills out a form where they are asked if they are a member of "the Protestant community", "the Roman Catholic community" or neither.
Of course you understand that the "protestant community" is not an homogenous group with shared views and opinions on these things. The reason that question is on the forms is because of historical discrimination against Catholics and the need to quantify heritage issues in order to avoid such discrimination forwards.
One protestant might feel embarrassment, another might feel pride, and another might not care at all. Suggesting there's a unified view from "the protestant community' is disingenuous.
>Suggesting there's a unified view from "the protestant community' is disingenuous.
I've yet to meet a member of that community in person (now you've decided they exist) who has any interest in Ulster Scots as a language, (even people who are quite opinionated and argumentative on other NI topics). This is evident in the lack of Ulster Scots language classes. There are more Irish classes running in East Belfast than for Ulster Scots.
Outside of the political class (who are only interested in it as a means to stifle support for the Irish language) Ulster Scots advocates are exclusively found online.
It doesn't. It's just an opinion piece about the use of neologisms in certain publications. It makes the same claim about incomprehensibility for native speakers but also fails to reference the voices of any actual native speakers. Who are they? Do they really complain about this as you said?
> I've yet to meet a member of that community in person who has any interest in Ulster Scots as a language
Well? I have met them. I've met lecturers at Queens such as Ivan Herbison studying the thing, I've met artists like Willie Drennan touring the country sharing contemporary poetry and song in Ulster Scots. I've met people in the countryside of Antrim not only with an interest in it, but speaking it day to day. Just because you haven't personally encountered these people doesn't mean they don't exist.
> now you've decided they exist
This is quite unfriendly. I made a clear distinction between what you were claiming--a single protestant community who are collectively embarrassed by Ulster Scots--and the collection of people with a shared background who identify as protestants for the sake of anti-discrimination laws, but who are otherwise diverse in their beliefs and opinions. To say that in so doing I somehow conceded your original claim is again disingenuous. It also seems absurd in relation to your broader point to now insist that just because some politician decided a form should say "protestant community" that that is necessarily reflective of an on-the-ground reality.
> There are more Irish classes running in East Belfast than for Ulster Scots.
By your definition of native speakers everyone in East Belfast is already brought up speaking Ulster Scots at home, so of course there's more interest in other languages. There are more people from East Belfast attending Irish classes than English classes too, it doesn't mean no one is interested in English.
You asked for opinions and you got opinions. I can't disprove your claims about who you've met and what language they were speaking. I can only say it's at odds with my experience.
>By your definition of native speakers everyone in East Belfast is already brought up speaking Ulster Scots at home
But reading and writing in it? And would they agree they're speaking Ulster Scots or would they say it's English?
>There are more people from East Belfast attending Irish classes than English classes too
Did you not learn English in school? I find it hard to believe English isn't taught in East Belfast schools. And that's not counting English as a second language classes for immigrant communities. What language is the signage in in East Belfast?
My comments are entirely aside from the dialect vs. language argument as a miniscule minority care about Ulster Scots in NI as a language in its own right - comparative even to say Cant or Shelta - versus the usual Stormont tomfoolery like 'cash for ash' scandals.
Simply put, Ulster Scots prominence in legislation is merely a reflection of bad-faith political negotiations by Unionists to degrade the status of the Irish Language Act by proxy. Anyone on the ground knows it for the dog-whistle that it is, used simply to curry favour with a particularly sectarian unionist base in as a counter to the Irish Language provisions outlined and agreed to in the Good Friday Agreement.
This has more or less been the case ever since the forced Ulster plantations lead to the development of Ulster Scots as a defined community with resilient Protestant and unionist ties. It'd be far more credible if Fingal tried to secede from Dublin and the Republic tomorrow morning using Yola as a justification.
In short, the ILA and promotion of Gaeilge in the north is about trying to make some small reparation at a state level for a cultural genocide perpetrated by our Colonists, and to help re-establish the oldest written vernacular language in western Europe, dating back over 2,500 years.
The promotion of Ulster Scots however... well the Commissioner is literally called 'Commissioner for Ulster Scots and Ulster British Tradition'. This is after DUP members removed themselves from the equality and good relations group after basically fillibustering for 5 years of discussions on bi-lingual signs to force a stalemate.
Haha I just added it as a fun fact, I don't actually believe folks will need to start retraining things, or that this is likely to be at the top of the priorities list for anyone. Party programmes are aspirational anyway.
Not sure what happened there but your link disproves your statement.
Specifically, the link says two things:
1. That 2 parties want to add *limburgish* to the list, not frisian. That's the bottom-right part of The Netherlands, about as far removed from Friesland as you can get (which is the top part of the Netherlands).
2. That one party wants to add Frisian, but, that is a one-day fly party that will cease to exist in a few hours as they will get 0 seats in this election and will presumably call it a day right after. It was a party founded to support one person and that person has quit due to workstress, and is highly unlikely to return as this _was_ his return. Their opinion used to be relevant as they had 13.3% of the seats this past session (and didn't exist before it). But, it isn't here.
Whoops yeah, misremembered - didn't reread as I posted the link. Was more of a fun off-the-cuff remark, so didn't spend too much energy on it. But yes, I meant Limburgish rather than Frisian.
Not a question, but - Tatoeba could use your help! It is an open source (both code and data) dataset of parallel sentences and their Maltese data is very lacking. Also it’s pretty fun to just translate a bunch of random sentences into a language you speak. :-)
I don't have much personal experience in attempting to communicate with arabic speakers. From others I have heard Lebanese arabic is the closest and you can have a passable conversation.
Not sure which Tunisians are claiming this but they'd definitely need a lot more than minimum effort. Maltese split off from Arabic around 1k years ago. The two languages sound pretty different, and are written with different alphabets.
As an Algerian, I can confirm that Maltese is surprisingly easy to understand. I was genuinely shocked the first time I heard it because the similarities are so obvious. Many Arabic dialects are also written using the Latin alphabet, especially online and on social media, so the different writing systems aren’t really a barrier at all.
Calling BS on this one. I'll let ChatGPT handle it... it says it better than I could:
can arabic people understand maltese?
That’s a really interesting question — and the answer is: *partially, but not easily.*
Here’s why:
### Linguistic roots
Maltese is a *Semitic language*, and its *core grammar and basic vocabulary* come from *Arabic*, specifically from *Siculo-Arabic*, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta about 1,000 years ago. Because of that, *many Maltese words sound familiar* to Arabic speakers — especially from the *Maghrebi (North African)* or *Levantine* dialects.
For example:
| Maltese | Meaning | Similar in Arabic |
| ------- | ------- | ----------------- |
| Dar | house | دار (dar) |
| Kelb | dog | كلب (kalb) |
| Seba | seven | سبعة (sabʿa) |
| Xemx | sun | شمس (shams) |
### Influence from Italian and English
However, over the centuries, Maltese absorbed *a lot of Italian (especially Sicilian)* and *English* vocabulary — so modern Maltese is *a hybrid*. Roughly:
* 30–40% of its vocabulary is Semitic (Arabic origin),
* 40–50% is Romance (mostly Italian/Sicilian),
* and the rest is English and other sources.
That means Arabic speakers might *recognize some words and structures*, but they’ll *struggle to understand full sentences*, especially because:
* Pronunciation has changed,
* Grammar evolved differently,
* Many everyday words are not Arabic anymore.
### Summary
So:
* *Yes*, Maltese and Arabic share a deep connection — like cousins.
* *No*, they’re *not mutually intelligible* today.
An Arabic speaker might catch words here and there, but a real conversation would be hard without studying Maltese.
The above is exactly my experience with Arabic speakers by the way. Again, not surprising after 1k years of divergence.
Tunisian dialect must have split of at the same time, because it's as far from arabic as maltese is. most arabs don't understand our dialect (fortunately we also speak standard arabic which we learn at school). I read some research saying maltese/tunisian is a separate language called lingua franca
I recently discovered Maltese existed, and started learning it that day. I find it such an awesome language, and not just because of the letter Ħ
I do wonder what natives think and feel about the longevity of their language? What is taught in schools at what ages (assuming English is in the mix somewhere). Is there enough media in Maltese for Malti to go about the moderns at fully in Maltese? It’s shockingly hard to find any information on Maltese, and even harder to find content.
I’m not sure if’s dying out, or in danger thereof; if there are preservation efforts, or if there is no need.
Native Maltese speaker here. It is thought in schools alongside English, with both being official national languages. Most people locally, that are not foreign born or immigrants speak the language, and it is used in most households as the main language. But everyone grows up bilingual, as English is essential for most everything else that we do as a nation.
How are loan words viewed? Do businesses work in Maltese? Are monolingual speakers of the language regarded differently than those fluent in English? Do young people in Malta listen to Maltese music?
Maltese has been loaded with loan words since forever. 5 points if you can guess where bonġu, bravu and mappa come from. At some point there was some literary council for the language that decided that any new loan words should just be spelled phonetically. Computer became kompjuter.
Businesses do work in Maltese and English. Both are official languages. Its quite rare to encounter a business that deals near exclusively in Maltese. Many prefer Maltese but will fall back to english where necessary.
Regarding monolignual speakers, I think theres a lot of stereotypes for maltese only, english only and code switchers. I think its all a bit silly... So as long as communication can happen I don't fuss.
On Maltese music... There's a lot of low ish quality music then there's a few absolute gems. Look up The Travellers, Lapes, Jon Mallia on YouTube/Spotify.
Not sure if I should be get bonus points for that, but if mappa means map, the ultimate origin is still Semitic. Latin seem to have took the word maappa from a Canaanite language. The word mappa (and it's older version "manpa") is attested in Minshnaic Hebrew (meaning a napkin or a tablecloth), although you could say Hebrew "re-loaned" the cartographic meaning - which is much newer.
I can concur. All older words (think any word that was needed since the older generations), are Arabic based. All the numbers, all older verbs etc. 'Newer' words are latin based.
Interesting, but I get the impression that ubiquitous English loan words in seemingly every language is a lot different than loan word patterns of the past. Do you think? Maybe not?
I'm actually really curious about everyday usage of the language; is code switching between English and Maltese more common than Maltese on its own? I've seen a few online communities where the vocabulary switches between Maltese and English very often which is interesting but I wonder how much of that is just online / written versus everyday speech.
Depends on where you live and how you were brought up, but for the most part code switching is default.
There was a point about 7 years ago when the overton window shifted to "speak english to strangers first" because of a large influx of foreigners who did not know the language. Since then I've met foreigners who have better Maltese than some natives.
Older folks & geriatrics will sometimes be surprised when they assume someone is foreign and they turn out to be Maltese. "int Malti??" is a statement I get often because I don't look Mediterranean despite being born here.
How is "Marsaxlokk" really pronounced? I've heard that word a few times, but never from a native. Google translate can't help me here, as it doesn't seem to have Maltese text-to-speech.
From what I have heard, Lebanese Arabic is the closest, and still pretty far. Passable conversation is possible.
Maltese is definitely its own language. Arabic roots are there (theres a Semitic joke in there ) but it isn't arabic anymore. Its written left to right with a variant of the english alphabet.
Writing RTL or LTR and alphabet alone don't make a language different.
Hindi and Urdu are 90% the exact same language, and are mutually inteligible (Urdu speaker and Hindi speaker can have complete full conversation with each other) but each is written differently (one LTR the other RTL) and with different alphabets
See also Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. I also find Chinese to be interesting, e.g. Mandarin and (formal) Cantonese have a near identical written language, while the spoken language is completely different, views on whether or not those languages are different languages or dialects vary wildly.
In my books, the distinction between languages and dialects are so arbitrary that the best method is simply to ask the people that speak those languages/dialects. If they consider them to be different language (which Maltese speakers seemingly do) I call them different languages.
Mandarin-Cantonese is very interesting and a unique (to my knowledge) example where the same written language can be completely different to two different people.
I don't buy the argument of just asking the speakers. There are cultural, political, etc. reasons people may think things which don't conform with reality. Many Hindi-Urdu speakers get insulted by the reality that the languages are pretty much the same because they don't want to identify with people from another country their country is constantly at war with.
I know that the reverse understanding isn't too bad from chatting with a Saudi-born member of staff on holiday in Malta.
I don't think anyone would seriously consider it a dialect of Arabic though with its completely different alphabet and half the vocabulary and morphology coming from Italian languages/dialects, even if Malta hadn't spent the best part of a millennium trying very hard not to become part of the Arab world
I was thinking about separating the two groups when I was writing this but was afraid of getting too verbose, though in retrospect that probably would have made more sense regardless of the historical lineage. My apologies if this came off as inconsiderate.
I updated my original comment, and learned a good amount about that dispute as a result, so thanks for calling it out.
I think some people get touchy about them being lumped together if their last period of commonality (per the article) was 1400 BCE. For comparison, I believe all the Slavic languages were mutually intelligible around 1200 AD. But much more recently than this, in the last few centuries, there have been notable attempts by east slavs to absorb the Baltic language cultures and deny them.
I may be off by 100-200 years, but this is what I read. There were accents and regionalisms but they were all mutually intelligible.
It is an example I think of often, about how quickly languages can change. In the scale of 1000 years, a lot changes. Most of the diversity in Romance languages is from around that timescale too, it really started to diverge substantially around 900ad-1100ad.
Depends on your standards, too. Even today, any pair of slavic speakers should have a head start in understanding each other. Put them next to each other for a month and they should be talking, at least about basic everyday things.
I was in Crimea for about 2 weeks (in 2012) they split me Russian there. I couldn't understand a word they said. And I didn't learn to understand than for 2 weeks of travel there.
I could understand some words from Ukrainian (I traveled by train from Lviv).
Another example is Croatian, I've been there on vacation and renting a room. I couldn't understand a word they said and didn't learn any.
TlI can understand some Czech (because this is the closest language together with Slovakian to Polish) but that's it.
I wouldn't mix Slavs from different groups together. They evolved separately and are as close as English and German.
Well there is if you go far enough. It's just the question when did they split off from each other. However there is no question that Baltic and Slavic are more closely related to each other than any other non extinct Indo-European languages.
The fact they they are the closest surviving relatives on it own doesn't mean it makes sense to group them together (i.e. Italo-Celtic is also a theorized subgroup in a similar way but nobody is disputing that Celtic and Italic languages evolved into distinct groups).
Then there is a huge amount of missing links and unknown unknowns. e.g. Thracian and Dacian probably were also pretty close to Baltic or Slavic (maybe even closer to Baltic than Slavic is but we don't know enough about them to make any conclusive claims at all... but we at least know these languages existed)
Plenty of wrong here, considering Lithuanian and Latvian are utterly unintelligible to slavs, save for loanwords, but Slavic languages between themselves retain some level of intelligibility, which even spawned two competing constructed languages.
Yup, most of Eastern Europe are Balto-Slavic. While the division from the Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Belarussian, Ukranian, etc) is distant, they are still Slavic. From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language.
I regret being that loose with the designation :), Romanian and Hungarian are valid counter arguments.
In my mind, I was thinking of the belt of countries between Russia and Central Europe, starting from the Baltics down to the Balkan (excluding Greece).
Even by your definition, I can count at least seven countries where the official language is not Slavic. And that's not even including all the Altaic, Romance and other assortment of regional languages, many of which have some sort of official status.
Some of my fellow Romanians will also claim they're Central European, but in my mind, all the ones I listed are Eastern European countries. I'd even include Turkey and Kazakhstan in there, part of the latter is to the West of the Urals, which is what we normally consider the border between Europe and Asia.
That's cute. It is clear thats an outdated political organization and not geographical. Read at the groupings. Greece is more eastern than Albania (and it is one hour off timezone), and it says 'western' which is not the case by any geographic means.
“There’s a question” implies that there is a ground truth that might be discovered to resolve this rather than simply a clash of different purely arbitrary definitions of the same terms.
The Visegrad 4 (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)are generally taken to be "Central European". The strict East/West division is largely a product of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.
No, the distinction into West/Central/East Europe was also relevant in the centuries prior. You're right with, that East Europe starts with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
Ah, yes, how could I forget! As a side note, though also Finno-Ugric then similarity in sound and appearance from Finnish or Estonian at least appears very far.
Cappadocian Greek is Greek heavily mixed with Turkish, to the extent that is arguably better viewed as a distinct Hellenic language rather than just a nonstandard Greek dialect. However, around a century ago, most Greek speakers were expelled from Turkey and deported to Greece (and the same happened in reverse, most Turkish-speakers in Greece were deported to Turkey), including almost all Cappadocian-speakers - and they and their descendants largely switched to standard modern Greek - with the result that it was long believed that Cappadocian had died out in the 1960s, although more recently it has been discovered that there remain small populations of Cappadocians in rural Greece keeping the language alive.
Seems like the model isn't limited to those though, from the paper:
> as well as some additional relevant languages (Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Galician, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian).
The paper also goes into detail on training set sources, which I feel like a curation thereof might be considered the main contribution of this publication?
Flemish is more of a political construct than linguistic, it's a grouping of belgian-dutch the coastal, brabant and limburg language groups with each having their own regional dialects.
It's more than political. In speaking Flemish is to Dutch as UK English is to US English. In writing however there is no difference in spelling, but there is a difference in word choice.
Now, being from Belgium, even within that small part of the country where everybody is supposed to speak Dutch, I genuinely don't understand people from near the coast, which was about 150 miles from where I used to live.
Well yes, the dialects are very distinct linguistically, but what is often referred to as Flemish is the Dutch "tussentaal" aka "verkavelingsvlaams"[1]. That's not really a language per se, it's a regiolect of the official Dutch language, itself a Dutch variant of the Brabant dialects. The Flemish Dutch is usually used a lingua franca because the official Dutch otherwise sounds too formal (and native dialect speakers are foreign language speakers of Dutch). If I was to nominate a regional language for recognition it would more be the regional dialects like Brugs, Gents, Antwerps, Brussels Vloms, Hasselts, etc.
What I find interesting is that the differences in Flemish dialects make them much more distinct than what would normally call dialects. There are significant grammatical difference beyond the usual vocabulary differences. For instance, coastal Flemish conjugates yes and no[1], Limburgisch is a tonal language.
I think those 24 languages reflect all the languages that are official languages at country level.
So for instance, Basque is not an official language of any country (only French in France and Spanish/Castilian in Spain). Belgium's official languages are French, Dutch, and German, "Flemish" is only a local variant of Dutch (Belgian French is also only a local variant of French).
Official is a weird concept though. Turns out Dutch law never really bothered to define an official language, Dutch simply is the de facto standard and is required for a lot of things making it effectively the standard. This makes Dutch Sign Language the only language officially recognised by law. An attempt to recognise Frysian and Dutch as official languages in the constitution failed.
Sweden didn't have an "official" language before the Language Law of 2009. Five minority languages (Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, Sámi, Yiddish) were officially recognized as such since 1999.
In the US, people will resort to fisticuffs, over variants of Spanish. I usually translate into Castilian Spanish, because that seems to be the equivalent of "Vanilla" Spanish. No one is really happy (except the Spaniards), but I'm not accused of favoritism.
For what it’s worth, Castilian sounds very odd to American ears. For a good time you can ask «¿en castellano?» and be met with either a blank stare or laughter.
Basque is an official language and declared as such in the Spanish constitution however restricted only to the regions that decide to apply it (Basque Country and Navarra).
If we want to go all legal, I believe that Spanish/Castilian is the only official language of the State, so at country level, with the other "Spanish languages" only official in their respective areas:
Section 3
(1) Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it.
(2) The other Spanish languages shall also be official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes.
(3) The richness of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be specially respected and protected. [1]
Not sure that should be the qualifier, there might be more people able to speak Basque in the world than Danish, doesn't stop Danish from being well supported.
Quick google points to about 1M Basque speakers in the EU against 5-6M Danish speakers, there's also the fact that Basque is not the only official language in the country it belongs to, and that it's in fact not spoken in the vast majority of the country.
>One of the EU’s founding principles is multilingualism.
>This policy aims to:
>communicating with its citizens in their own languages
>protecting Europe’s rich linguistic diversity
>promoting language learning in Europe
With this in mind, the first intention fails by an enormous margin, given that 95%+ of Spain doesn't speak an iota of Basque, the second is met handily, given the long history of the language, and I'm not sure what to think about the third, any language whatsoever would serve that purpose.
Norwegian is not on this list, because in fact no country with Norwegian as their national language is part of the European Union at the time of writing.
"Norwegian" isn't just one unified language and Norway isn't in the EU.
That being said, the Scandinavian languages all come from old Norse, and modern national constructs aside, most of the people in the those areas descend from the same mix of Germanic tribes. There's no denying that modern-day Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are very similar.
English is an official EU language because Regulation 1 Article 1 says so [0] and hasn’t been changed. In practice, English is the most widely used language in EU institutions, so it would be have been silly to remove it after Brexit.
English at this point has stopped culturally belonging to the United Kingdom and whilst one can discus it's not so very moral way of getting there, it's become the bridge language for people of different languages to communicate in, further solidified by the internet.
That said, whenever there is a language selection UI (e.g. at banking machines or institutional websites) in wider Europe that uses flags to represent languages -- probably not a good idea to start with, but very common -- the Irish tricolour should be used to indicate English rather than the UK or USA flags. (although cf Airteagal 8 of Bunreacht na hÉireann).
Cool, so the European Union and overlapping institutions could see this as an opportunity to promote greater public knowledge about one of their respective member states. Seems like an argument in favour of encouraging the display of a member state's flag rather than that of a non-member-state or former member state (especially given that state's history with respect to Ireland).
Using flags alone is already poor UI since there are many languages which spill across the borders into multiple member states and non-member states, and some member states with multiple official and commonly spoken languages.
But a menu item that reads: [Irish flag] (English) like one that reads [Swedish flag] (Svenska) does not seem worse than the legacy use of the UK flag or the popular use of the US one.
AFAIK Ireland only listed Gaelic as their official language with UK having English. That caused a bit of a problem during Brexit since technically English wasn't officially an EU language anymore. I guess they resolved it somehow.
>The EuroLLM Team brings together some of the brightest minds in AI including Unbabel, Instituto Tecnico Lisbon, the University of Edinburgh, Instituto de Telecommunicacoes, Université Paris-Saclay, Aveni, Sorbonne University, Naver Labs, and the University of Amsterdam.
>Europe is the only continent in the world to have a large public network of supercomputers that are managed by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). As soon as we received the EuroHPC JU access to the supercomputer, we were ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We developed the small model right away and in less than 6 months the second model was ready.
>Europe is the only continent in the world to have a large public network of supercomputers that are managed by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU).
Who would have thought that Europe is the only continent to have a network of supercomputers managed by Europe⸮
Aren't all frontier models already able to use all these languages? Support for specific languages doesn't need to be built in, LLMs support all languages because they are trained on multilingual data.
I keep hearing that LLMs are trained on "Internet crap" but is it true? For instance we know from Anthropic copyright case that they scanned millions of books to make a training set. They certainly use Internet content for training but I'm sure it's curated to a large degree. They don't just scrap random pages and feed into LLM.
> I keep hearing that LLMs are trained on "Internet crap" but is it true?
Karpathy repeated this in a recent interview [0], that if you'd look at random samples in the pretraining set you'd mostly see a lot of garbage text. And that it's very surprising it works at all.
The labs have focused a lot more on finetuning (posttraining) and RL lately, and from my understanding that's where all the desirable properties of an LLM are trained into it. Pretraining just teaches the LLM the semantic relations it needs as the foundation for finetuning to work.
Pretraining teaches LLMs everything. SFT and RL is about putting that "everything" into useful configurations and gluing it together so that it works better.
It is true. Datasets are somewhat cleaned, but only somewhat. When you have terabytes worth of text, there's only so much cleaning you can do economically.
We are talking about government-curated data here, the bias should be obvious. Popular LLMs still have huge bias problems but it would be way worse with only government-curated data.
No, that's not how training works. It's not just about having an example in a given language, but also how many examples and the ratio of examples compared to other languages. English hugely eclipses any other language on most US models and that's why performance on other languages is subpar compared to performance on english.
My first impulse is to say that some languages have better SNR on the internet. (less garbage autogenerated or SEO content compared to useful information)
I have never noticed any major difference in performance of ChatGPT between English and Spanish. The truth is that as long as the amount of training data of a given language is above some threshold, knowledge transfers between languages.
The issue starts, when an LLM's transfers knowledge between languages, even though that knowledge is not correct in that language. I have seen this with e.g. ChatGPT answers regarding laws for example where it refers to US laws when asked in German, which are obviously not relevant.
> The issue starts, when an LLM's transfers knowledge between languages, even though that knowledge is not correct in that language. I have seen this with e.g. ChatGPT answers regarding laws for example where it refers to US laws when asked in German, which are obviously not relevant.
There is no necessary correlation between language and the correct set of laws to reference. The language of the question (or the answer, if for some reason they are not the same) is an orthogonal issue to the intended scope. There is no reason US laws couldn't be the relevant to a question asked in German (and, conversely, no reason US laws couldn't be wrong for a question asked in English, even if it was specifically and distinguishably US English.)
When you ask an LLM (in German) without further clarifying your location I expect it to refer to German (or Austrian/Swiss) laws.
For most questions it does this pretty well (e.g. asking for the legal age to drink). However once the answer becomes more complex it starts to halucinate very quickly. The fact that some of the hallucinations are just translated US laws makes me think that the knowledge transfer between languages is probably not helping in instances like this.
Ratio/quantity is important, but quality is even more so.
In recent LLMs, filtered internet text is at the low end of the quality spectrum. The higher end is curated scientific papers, synthetic and rephrased text, RLHF conversations, reasoning CoTs, etc. English/Chinese/Python/JavaScript dominate here.
The issue is that when there's a difference in training data quality between languages, LLMs likely associate that difference with the languages if not explicitly compensated for.
IMO it would be far more impactful to generate and publish high-quality data for minority languages for current model trainers, than to train new models that are simply enriched with a higher percentage of low-quality internet scrapings for the languages.
Training is a very different thing. Can’t speak for European, but LLMs are often much worse in Japanese because tokenisation used Unicode and a single Japanese character often has to be represented by more than one token
I think you meant to say that tokenization is usually done with UTF-8 and a single Japanese character generally takes 3 or more code units (i.e. bytes). Unicode itself is not the culprit (in fact, even with UTF-16 tokenization, most Japanese characters would fit in a single code unit, and the ones that won't are exceedingly rare).
I have to admit I have not encountered significant mistokenization issues in Japanese, but I'm not using it on a daily basis LLMs. I'm somewhat dobutful this can be a major issue, since frontier LLMs are absolutely in love with Emoji, and Emoji requires at least 4 UTF-8 bytes, while most Japanese characters are happy with just 3 bytes.
From what I am aware of, LLM capability degrades once you move out of English, and many nation states are either building, or considering the option of building their own LLMs.
Not natively, they all sound translated in languages other than English. I occasionally come across French people complaining about LLMs' use of non-idiomatic French, but it's probably not a French problem at all, considering that this effort includes so many Indo-European languages.
I can at least also confirm this for German. Here is one example that is quite annyoing:
Chat GPT for example tends to start emails with "ich hoffe, es geht dir gut!", which means "I hope you are well!". In English (especially American) corporate emails this is a really common way to start an email. In German it is not as "how are you" isn't a common phrase used here.
Term support is vague. Can you do basic interaction in most other languages? Sure. Is it anywhere close to competence it has in english? No. Most models seem to just translate english responses at beginners simplistic monotone level.
If it's publicly available data, books and research, I can assure you the big models have already all been trained on it.
European culture is already embedded in all the models, unless the people involved in this project have some hidden trove of private data that they're training on which diverges drastically from things Europeans have published publicly (I'm 99.9% positive they don't...especially given Europe's alarmist attitude around anything related to data).
I think people don't understand a huge percentage of the employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. are non-US born.
Meh, it depends a lot on the dataset, which are heavily skewed towards the main languages. For example they almost always confuse Czech and Slovak and often swap one for the other in middle of chats
You can also correctly bias your sampling so that when selecting new training instances each language is chosen equally. Generally the diversity of data is good, unless that data is "wrong" which, ironically, is probably most of the internet, but I digress.
The difference ia larger than let's say just a "dialect". They really are different languages, even though we generally understand each other quite well (younger generations less so). I've heard it's about as different as e. g. Danish and Swedish - not sure if that comparison is helpful.
Some cursory clicking about didn't reveal to me the actual corpus they used, only that it is several trillion tokens 'divided across the languages'. I'm curious mainly because Irish (among some other similarly endangered languages on the list) typically has any large corpus come from legal/governmental texts that are required to be translated. There must surely be only a relatively tiny amount of colloquial Irish in the corpus. It be interesting to see some evals in each language particularly with native speakers.
I think LLMs may be on the whole very positive for endangered languages such as Irish, but before it becomes positive I think there's an amount of danger to be navigated (see Scots Gaelic wikipedia drama for example)
Can you provide a link about the “Scots Gaelic Wikipedia drama” you reference? I've heard of drama related to the Scots Wikipedia but that has nothing to do with Gaelic.
I was thinking the same, why are so many superior models coming from only countries like US and China. And why are European countries not in the list other than France with Mistral. Why are so few companies in India, Japan, South Korea even close to a promising new model like what Chinese companies did ?
"Why" is a fair question but are you surprised? Europe is consistently behind in tech.
Europe has about 1.3 times the population of the USA and about 75% of the GDP yet EU tech output is a very small percentage of US tech output. We are not talking about 70, 50, 30, or even 20%. It's a drop in the bucket.
>The seven largest U.S. tech companies, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, are 20 times bigger than Europe’s seven largest, and generate 10 times more revenue.
"Why" is a good question, but I definitely wouldnt expect significant competition in LLMs from Europe based on the giant tech disparity. Having 1 non-cutting edge model that isn't really competitive is pretty much what I would expect.
> The seven largest U.S. tech companies (...) are 20 times bigger than Europe’s seven largest, and generate 10 times more revenue.
I'm going to guess that this part is intentional. Europe tends to be more aggressive in enforcing antitrust laws. Economically, Europe's goal isn't to have the biggest companies but to have more smaller companies.
So you're not going to get companies like Google, but you will get companies like Proton, Spotify, Tuta, Hetzner, Mistral, Threema, Filen, Babbel, Nextcloud, CryptPad, DeepL, Vivaldi, and so on.
>I'm going to guess that this part is intentional. Europe tends to be more aggressive in enforcing antitrust laws. Economically, Europe's goal isn't to have the biggest companies but to have more smaller companies.
So is your hypothesis that the total market cap of EU tech companies is something like 50,60,70, etc. % of total US tech marketcap? Something significantly different than the ~10% implied by that figure (largest us companies 10x largest EU companies). And it's just more broadly distributed?
European companies are smaller on average and less likely to go public in general, so market cap comparisons don’t show the whole picture. Growing big is less often seen as a goal than in the US. “Megacaps” aren’t necessarily considered a healthy thing to have.
I don't see any sense in which the EU has fewer capabilities. It has, say, a smaller number of businesses with smaller market dominance.
It isnt clear to me what capability the EU would gain by having a monopolist social network, a monopolist search engine, a monopolist advertising trader
Antitrust laws are not the reasons for more smaller companies. Getting an antitrust case off in Europe is very hard, not US hard but still hard. The reasons are more complex then that.
Also, commercial software is consistently behind from open source.
I only use open source LLMs for writing (Qwen 32b from Groq) and open source editor of course, Emacs.
If some people can write better using commercial LLMs (and commercial editors), by all means, but they put themselves at a disadvantage.
Next step for me, is to use something open source for translation, I use Claude for the moment, and open source for programming, I use GPT curently. In less than a year I will find a satisfying solution to both of these problems. I haven't looked deep enough.
As a European citizen I think it boils down to access to the capital. EU/EEA is not a country and the market is sort of fragmented. The big players are UK, France, Germany, everyone else does not have the same access to money as say in the US. Folks want to do it but there is a glass ceiling. Hence you have these collabs among large institutions to tap into funds such as from Horizon which are academic in nature and do not translate well into products.
The fun part is that people whining about not being able to raise common capital and operate across whole EU due to regulation tend to also be the most rabid opposers of any kind of common regulation that would bring whole EU into alignment and make it a less fragmented market.
You can easily fit below 10 billion for the whole datacenter, then you only pay for electricity + maintenance + staff. 100k GPUs cost a few billion USD, that's more than enough to train frontier models, run experiments, and serve models in the EU to start. Look at what xAI did and how much it cost them and it's more expensive to do in US than in EU.
EU made a >900 page law about AI and patted themselves on the back for being "the first to regulate AI" (which was not even true, China had an AI law before and it's two pages long).
This cannot be stressed enough. In my experience working in multiple tech startups in Germany, the power compliance, legal and all other 2nd line has over engineering is quite immense. Most of the time they act as a hindrance for innovation rather than a supporting factor.
This AI law is a clear example of that. Pencil pushers creating more obstacles for the sake of creating more obstacles rather than actually taking a pragmatic approach.
It's strange, my real life experience is very different than yours. Unless you're training AI to do something shady, it's really no bother at all. In fact, most of what the AI Act requires, you have to do anyway for a good model card.
I agree. And I also know how much of that experience comes from having a legal dept. that are collaborative and supportive of what the tech org wants to do. Which I suspect is quite rare.
Because the value of these models is (actually) yet to be proven. Why saturate the market with something that we already have at least one of and others are selling as a service? No model provider (including the "big ones" like OpenAI) has been able to produce a viable business case. They're all literally running on government deals and investor money.
Does it even make sense? Just use the American or Chinese ones, adjust
As needed. Where’s the point in spending millions to build
The same thing or worse
The leading European ECommerce Company, Zalando with 50m users, is now using the leading European AI platform, Hopsworks, to power their real-time AI. Zalando are Databricks largest EU customer, but they are using Hopsworks instead for operational AI.
You would never hear it, though, as European IT press only promotes SV startups
I used the 9B Instruct version, from the small models, it was the one with the best Latvian knowledge out there, bar none. GPT-OSS 20B and Qwen3 30B A3B and similar ones weren't even close.
That said, the model itself was a little bit dumb and not something you'd really use for programming/autocomplete or tool calling or anything like that, which also presented some problems - even for processing text, if you need RAG or tool server calls, you need to use something like Qwen3 for the actual logic and then pass the contents to EuroLLM for translation/formatting with the instructions, at which point your n8n workflow looks a bit messy and also you have to run those two models instead of only one.
Meanwhile, the best cloud model for Latvian that I've found so far was Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, but obviously can't use cloud models in certain on-prem use cases.
It seems there is some weird grouping of the language data which LLM cannot distinguish well. I wonder if it is the same for other similar languages like scandinavian or western slavic
While grant process in EU isn't fun, I think Levels has bit of an ego issues. He mentioned that if he had issues like that on eg X, he would see Elon himself in the replies.
While he is great at converting his influencer status to income in his micro-SaaS projects, I don't think running ad-fueled browser games on state-sponsored super computer should be really aim of these grant programs.
Problem with these grant proposal things is that it favors established businesses over small founders. Establishes businesses have much more resources to go through all the legal / red tape issues.
I’ve seen this in practice with innovation subsidies: small startup has to spend a lot of time to go though all the hoops, taking up significant resources, to get modest compensation for actual innovative work. Larger business hires an external agency to do everything for them, to make silly proposals “convert website from jquery to react” as innovation, and gets thousands upon thousands of FTE-hours in subsidy compensation hours for it.
this! it favors established business with legal teams and (maybe more importantly) with connections.
The EU is also great at creating a heavy regulatory environment. Which entrenches existing incumbents. So the EU creates barriers that favor big companies, then tries to fix it with grants that... also favor big companies.
And then everyone's surprised that there's no innovation in Europe.
From all the world's companies worth over 100B$ there's only one European company - SAP, founded 50 years ago. [1]
>this! it favors established business with legal teams and (maybe more importantly) with connections.
This x2. A close friend of mine works at a major EU HW tech company and his job is wearing a suit, going to dinner parties and rubbing shoulders with high level local and national bureaucrats to convince them to fund X, Y, Z projects, none of which result in any major commercial success or ROI for the governments because the money they get is not enough to make new successful products, but hey, he's loving his job which gives him amazing job security against the waves of layoffs the company went through due to falling of sales, plus the networking he gets out of that is invaluable.
So at least some people are enjoying the gravy train while it lasts. But that's why a lot of EU tech companies immediately go to the US first before opening up to the EU market. US VSs are more generous with their cheque books than EU governments and investors, plus the 300 million people single consumer market speaking English as the common language and all that.
I left a research org because it was basically a professional gatherer and spender of grants. People would make some proposal with a consortium, spend the money, write a paper or two, visit a conference in eg Japan to present it, rinse and repeat. Hated that. Nothing to do with real innovation.
He is 100% right on this one. From personal experience trying to figure out EU. Lawyer bureaucrats manage funds behind red tape clearly meant to be for their pals.
All these while the EU is running out of funds and in a process of de-industrialization. There should be an independent corruption investigation on Brussels.
I took part in application for EU grants a few times and our company group did it many times over the years.
It's bureaucracy, often bordering with stupidity. You may need advisors to navigate all their forms & processes. But it certainly isn't "pals-only" type of deal.
On the other hand - is it harder than getting VC funding? For seasoned founder with reputation - probably. For fresh startup - probably not.
Reviewer (Scientific Expert) for the EU (since 2009) here.
The probability of getting a Horizon Europe grant allegedly (not official stats) is about 8.5% according to some friends, which may seem low. You need to write 70 pages following a Word template and the key goal is to cover answers to a large number of questions. Each proposal gets various grades across a range of dimensions, which get added up and if you obtain at least 13 out of a possible 15 points, you are eligible to get funded, read: "You will get funded if there is enough money." Often, there are several proposals that justly achieve 15/15, and because of that, many prosals that have 14 points and all proposals that have less may not get funded, simply because there just is not enough total funding available to fund all the technically eligible proposals. Having judged many proposals in AI / ML / search / "big data" / language technology etc. I recommend optimizing recall, i.e. aspiring completeness.
The application process is not easy, but you can get help: there are support agency in each member country, free online Webinars to help, hotline help desks as well as an ecosystem of paid consultants that typically charge about 3k€ to vet a proposal for you if you need that kind of service (I never used it).
The process is neutral and conducted professionally and with external oversight (consultants are hired as "rapporteurs" that report on process/procedural integrity in additional to the actual reviewers). I value the research officers of the EC as people of high competency, integrity and motivation (research money is tax payers money so it should be spent carefully).
In comparison, VC (and even more so business angel) funding is achievable with much less formal apparatus, often a short business plan and a convincing slide deck and demo can get people to a partner meeting if the time is right. But the criteria and process are much different, and ideas ready for public research grants are typically too early for VCs (but the EC wants to foster the creation VC-funded startups resulting from the disseminated research).
> The EIC welcomes applications from innovators in all EU Member States and countries associated to the Horizon Europe programme. It particularly welcomes applications from startups and SMEs with female CEOs.
So that's one that strongly pushes that angle. But the one I saw I clearly remember saying "female co-founder", not CEO.
Right but if we do this with public funds then the narrative shifts to "OMG the EU is so corrupt and stupid, looking they're pouring taxpayer dollars into unproven stuff! They're deindustrializing!!"
The point being that, as soon as public dollars are on the table, people expect perfection. Anything less is waste, fraud, and abuse.
There's literally no winning. Want to make sure the money is allocated right? Bureaucracy. Want to not do that? Waste, fraud, and abuse.
Except that Apple, Intel, Tesla, etc have all received US government investment [1]. TSMC is a product of the Taiwanese state! Government investment can be done well, and seeds excellent companies.
Denmark has a large hearing aids industry due to lots of government funding for hearing aids, and a large wind turbine industry due to funding for wind farms. So stimulating demand can work to build or strengthen an industry, but what Denmark and EU are doing with GPUs is stimulating supply in Europe and demand in the US. I would be surprised if that does not end up strengthening US and not EU industry.
I wouldn't count the wind turbine industry in the same category as startups, energy production and infrastructure are classical government investment schemes.
It doesn't matter if government funded startups have been successful. It's not the government's job to provide capital to high risk ventures. They should provide public services for the people and regulate the private sector according to the interest of the people.
Well, depends on your definition of high risk.
Basic research is definitely high risk, in that return for investment may happen generations from now if ever. I'd argue that funding of basic research through universities etc. is part of government's job.
And funding for basic research should be made so that the results belong to the public, for example through universities as you mentioned. Not through private startups.
The comment you're replying to is tainted with the survivorship bias. We see successful companies that got government funding, but not the opposite. Maybe we'd have more innovation and competition without government picking these specific winners.
Ironically, one of the companies you mentioned (Apple) now operates in an environment with very little competition and regularly faces antitrust claims.
Government picking winners may actually reduce competition in the long run.
The key difference: when private money picks wrong, it's their loss. When government picks wrong, it's taxpayer money.
Of course there is red tape. EU funding comes from taxpayer money and we want it to be spent wisely. The red tape is precisely to prevent it from being funneled to pals. EU has funded quite a few free software projects so it's not like the red tape is an insurmountable burden: https://www.ri.se/en/news/blog/europes-digital-future-spells...
I'd also say that their grants aren't unusually burdensome and grantmaking is arms length compared with a lot of other bodies.
Yes, some of the questions are weird, but I'd really rather write a bit confirming that the AI system being developed isn't going to be racist or Skynet than jump through some other hoops that exist (and that absolutely includes VC due diligence). The actual biggest issue with European funds is they get way more competent applications than they can fund anyway.
I'm actually no fan of his, so that's fine. That said, I went to the actual website he was talking about (I'm also an EU citizen) and in this case it is exactly as described and bordering comical.
> What's REALLY much more important though if you want to be a part of the AI race and I've posted for years here with @euaccofficial
is to make Europe a really extremely attractive place to start and run an AI business. Remove regulatory obstructions and give tax discounts for startups. Let them build a business first that can compete worldwide and once they make enough money (let's say $100M/y), then slowly start adding regulation.
When you talk to most EU business owners, even in tech, the limiting factor isn't regulations. This being the #1 reason is such a tired trope.
Ironically, China has in some ways a bigger regulatory burden when it comes to software, as there if the government doesn't approve the business is dead in the water. I doubt that Klarna would've gotten off the ground there, for one, I could see them being shut down much earlier there. In the EU only now very slowly are some governments even starting to talk about some weak measures around their business model. But I've never, not once in my life, heard "Chinese software companies can't get off the ground due to the regulatory burden".
The same people who clamor about the EU regulations are the ones who hate on the EU for their protectionist measures against US tech. Yet another bout of irony here - China's software industry has flourished exactly thanks to 10 times stronger protectionist measures against US tech. So has Korea's, and their protectionism has never even been anywhere on the China level, more inbetween EU and China. No, if there's anything that would help, it's much more tech protectionism in the EU.
Pieter Levels is at the end of the day an influencer, not a serious founder.
The root cause of that is the lack of a true Capital Market union.
In the US, you can get VC across state borders and VC can invest in any US company regardless of their location. Not in the EU.
Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible. And even if managed, now that NL investor has to repeat the entire process for Poland, Spain, Malta and other countries.
> Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible
If anything this would be due to Dutch regulations rather than Estonian ones. So that would be more of a problem for setting up VCs in the EU rather than attracting capital in general, as the same would apply to the rest of the world. Is it easier for a US or Singapore VC to invest in an Japanese startup vs an Estonian startup? As far as I know the answer is a "no", but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
This is because there's no unified capital market.
A texas VC can invest in a startup in Chicago and a startup in Florida can raise money from NY and so on.
> If anything this would be due to Dutch regulations rather than Estonian ones
Yes, because there's no unified capital market. You describe an effect not the cause. With 27 member states, if such regulations are bi-directional, you'd need 351 of such "regulations". If one way, you'd need 702.
In the US with 51 states, there aren't a total of 1,275 "regulation contracts" between all states, there's one, and it's federal.
I don't think you understood my point. This "disadvantage" applies the exact same way to starrups every other non-US country, it's not something specific to the EU so it makes no sense to posit it as an EU thing.
> Is it easier for a US or Singapore VC to invest in an Japanese startup vs an Estonian startup?
This was my main question, and it looks like the answer is indeed no.
Still, the existence of the EU is (to bring peace by) lowering, mostly economic, barriers that traditionally exist between countries.
And the comparison in this threat was "between EU and US" (in europe Thing is hard... in Europe you cannot... etc). When people use "The EU" or "Europe" in this sense, they consider it as a "Single thing". Europe, or the EU, has a great disadvantage for startups over the US. You say that is because Europe is not a "thing" like a country is. I say, that is because Europe seen as a "thing" lacks some critical infrastructure that "the thing called US" has - or even "the thing Brazil" or "China" do have, internally.
Opening a company in Estonia is very cheap but in Spain the manager/CEO needs to be an "autónomo" (like a self-employed tax status). This costs thousands of Euros per year. Something like 2,400-30,000 Euros per year, every year, forever.
The global ground is even less common. In that sense it's ironic to talk about this as if it's an EU issue. Non-EU/US countries are all completely separate. The EU has much more common ground amongst each other than the other 170 or so countries that aren't EU/US; in that sense, it's an advantage for EU startups compared to startups from the other 170 countries that aren't the US. Yet it gets positioned as this unique EU disadvantage, as "the reason why EU startups are 'behind'".
I'm sure there's at least one US state where it's a pain to set up a company. So startup founders don't set up in that state but in Delaware, or recently maybe 1-2 ones. Germany is that state for the EU where it's a pain, so you set up your legal entity elsewhere.
In countries that have it. In Slovenia we have no such legal entity and so starting a business requires, at the very least, ~400€/month for a single proprietorship (unless you are already employed elsewhere already, then it's <100€) or even more for an LLC-type company (since it requires one fully employed person at a level above minimal wage).
You just need to pay 60€ or so for a business license and off you go. A GmbH (a corporate structure with limited liability, somewhere between an LLC and Corp) is not needed if you want to start a) now and b) for almost zero cost.
It’s probably the people who didn’t start a business in the EU that you want to talk to. Like, I’m European, but I started my company in the US because everything is so much easier here.
Where in Europe and where in the US? You probably started one in the easiest US state to do so. Did you try starting one in the easiest EU state? Otherwise we already can't take things very seriously.
Secondly, what's easier besides VC funding? If it's VC funding, the disparity there has nothing to do with regulations - guess how much VC funding the non-EU rest of the world gets.
I’m actually bootstrapping, so the VC situation isn’t relevant to me.
It’s a distant memory to me now, I’m building a company and so much has happened that the details of this decision have faded away. But, between the AI act and GDPR, there’s a set of potential traps laid out for you to step into, along with reams of paperwork. All that requires lawyers and compliance consultants to help you figure it out, and that’s way too much for a fledgling startup.
I think it said it all that the AI regulations were written before there was really anyone to regulate. Why would I want to pour my heart and soul into a system that’s geared to find ways to stop me from building?
Anyway, it’s no longer relevant to me: I’m gone and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Awesome! I'm also bootstrapping. My company is set up in a place where the local version of the GPDR is significantly stricter and more onerous than the GDPR itself - yes, you heard it right, this exists! GDPR isn't even the toughest privacy laws in the world .
Yet startups here have managed to compete with US bigtech incomparably better than the EU. Shows that tough privacy laws have nothing to do with it.
> All that requires lawyers and compliance consultants to help you figure it out, and that’s way too much for a fledgling startup.
It also really just doesn't unless you're doing really shady stuff, in which case, good. The huge majority of startups don't need a lawyer to deal with GDPR.
> but I started my company in the US because everything is so much easier here
Which part is easier? That you have 50 different states with slightly varying laws to consider (e.g. Californian Data protection)? That you have a byzantine system of "benefits" to choose and manage?
And compared to where? Germany or Estonia or Sweden or Spain? The complexities will vary wildly depending on the country (kind of like in the US, where lots of companies pick the state to base themselves in based on the combination of favourable laws and precedents and taxes).
we might be somewhat trending in this direction, but the reality is largely that the US states are pretty identical and have very similar laws on the books. the federal government is in charge of commerce usually.
most laws like CCPA also have some threshold where you already need to be pretty successful for it to apply to you.
for some select industries (biometrics & healthcare), yes you have a patchwork of laws.
How much oversight is there and how strong is? And if you cover Califronia, New york, Texas and Florida. Would those other places really stop you, specifically if its online? And even if you get fined, how much is that fine going to be?
Because they are plenty of companies just ignoring regulation and simply paying the fines, as the enforcement often a joke.
When I got here, I realized that things are so much better here that the only thing that could get me back to Europe is a decision not to renew my visa.
> When you talk to most EU business owners, even in tech, the limiting factor isn't regulations. This being the #1 reason is such a tired trope.
Okay, what is the limiting factor? Because when I talk to EU business owners (admittedly, very few) - they point to lack of big EU capital markets, which is directly downstream of the policy environment. And when I talk to top EU human capital, they all point to the lack of competitive wages. There's a real difficulty in allocating capital to talented humans.
And, at least in Southern Europe, the income tax schedule is so aggressive it's hard to justify continuing working in many of these countries if you are highly talented.
Like, if you can tell me what the induced operator norm from l_2 -> l_2 is - probably you should come to the US and work at a biglab and make bank. What can you do in Portugal, Italy, Spain, etc.??
> Pieter Levels is at the end of the day an influencer, not a serious founder.
Sure, agreed.
I think it is a complete misreading to point to protectionism as the reason for Chinese success, but having a big unified domestic market for consumers along with massive saving rates and capital controls probably does help.
One fairly large factor is that even though English is much more common today, you just can't operate (depending on the product of course) in many countries without having customer support, documentation etc in the local language.
A big part is that the EU is a collection of countries that (with very few exceptions) have different languages and laws. For a company to serve Spain and France, for instance, it would need to translate everything, hire local lawyers and customer support agents. Considering the much smaller size of the countries (biggest one is 70 million vs 330 million in the US), the opportunity for "unlimited" growth is limited.
This also rebounds in the fact that when an American company makes it big, they have the resources to flood other EU markets and be cheaper/better than the local competition due to economies of scale and money based on their big successful US market. A French company making it big is still small compared to a US equivalent.
Then, there's the capital markets, no denying that. The money being thrown around the US is like nowhere else on the planet. Some of it definitely a bubble / unrealistic, but that doesn't matter. But in part it's because of the size of the total potential market that this is justified.
Education / national mythology also plays a part, I think (this is pure conjecture now). In the US, the "American Dream", "everyone can make it" etc is heavily ingrained. It propagates through the world with the help of Hollywood and other American cultural exports. In most EU countries, there isn't such a heavy emphasis on independence and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". "Hustle culture" isn't a thing. So for most people, it isn't something that comes naturally to them to start a company and work 100 hour weeks to be big and rich and successful and famous.
That's not to say there aren't such people, I went to 42 and have been to Station F and know some people in that universe. A decent proportion of my classmates wanted to make their startup and make it big, and some did end up starting their own companies.
> This also rebounds in the fact that when an American company makes it big, they have the resources to flood other EU markets and be cheaper/better than the local competition due to economies of scale and money based on their big successful US market. A French company making it big is still small compared to a US equivalent.
Ding ding ding! When China does it with solar and EVs we call it "dumping". When Uber, OpenAI and Anthropic do it, that term is never ever used. VC funded US techs dumps harder than any Chinese industry ever has.
> Considering the much smaller size of the countries (biggest one is 70 million vs 330 million in the US), the opportunity for "unlimited" growth is limited.
If you manage to get 10 million customers, your business is already successful on a gigantic scale, and you should have all the know-how in taking on the world. The success of other people is rarely the reason why you are failing in your own life. Start somewhere, do something.
> The money being thrown around the US is like nowhere else on the planet.
That's true and it's awesome. In Europe money is only thrown to real estate owners and any enterprising people with a dream are cordially invited to fucking forget about it, shut up, and fall back in line. Even if they already have a proven track record. They take their idea to the United States and are treated incredibly well in comparison. Even if their business will only be a niche business with limited reach, like 99% of businesses.
> Europe money is only thrown to real estate owners and any enterprising people with a dream are cordially invited to fucking forget about it, shut up, and fall back in line.
That's simply not true. Europe is a continent that includes startup powerhouse Sweden, UK that has a ton of them too, and France that is making massive strides (just check out Station F). It might be true in Slovakia or whatever, but you simply cannot say that broadly for the whole continent.
> That's true and it's awesome
Is it? It is to an extent, but it also encourages nonsense (Juicero, the AI spice mixer), pump and dump tech-isation of existing stuff with no business model (Wework) and outright scams (Theranos, Nikola).
If the barrier to entry to get money thrown at you is so low, a lot of it gets wasted. So the rest really really has to make it big, which gives some perverse incentives (like Uber dumping to driver old school taxis out of business to then jack up prices, because if they're not a monopoly/biggest fish in town, they wouldn't have been worth it)
Nations like Sweden and the UK might have a healthy startup scene despite not getting good help from banks and other capital institutions.
Go search the web for startup financing in Sweden. One of the big banks has a page dedicated to this - but they're not offering their own money, instead they're pointing to government grants and government lending programs.
> If the barrier to entry to get money thrown at you is so low, a lot of it gets wasted. So the rest really really has to make it big
You can't do your accounting like that. One entity does not make up for the losses of another entity. Money is cheap in the US and thrown around to bad startups and good startups. In Europe money is expensive and mostly available to governments or for real estate feudalism.
That's capital markets and the lack of capital markets is because of not having business friendly environment. Consumer protections strong, pro business not so much. Companies like Spotify go to the US to IPO.
Are you saying that the other 199 non-US countries in the world all have a business unfriendly environment, since every one of them besides China has practically the same amount of software VC funding compared to the US?
All of these purported EU-specific reasons completely ignore that things are the same elsewhere. It's the US that is the outlier.
> Consumer protections strong, pro business not so much.
That's not the reason the EU has no unified capital market.
The reason is that member states are reluctant to hand over control and power to EU. Just look at e.g. Eurobonds and the shitshow around that. Especially the rise of populist anti-EU parties all over, are causing this.
Ironically, the parties that "freedom lovers" like Musk are funding and pushing, are the ones causing the EU to not function as a single capital market and "not having a business friendly environment".
> I think it is a complete misreading to point to protectionism as the reason for Chinese success, but having a big unified domestic market for consumers along with massive saving rates and capital controls probably does help.
Capital controls are protectionist measures, but anyway, no.
> Okay, what is the limiting factor?
Let's look at which countries have a significant local software industry compared to population size.
- China
- US
- Korea
- You can argue for Japan and India but that's already starting to stretch.
- Yup, effectively no where else. Even in an "out of the way" place like Myanmar everyone uses Meta, with a nice little genocide to show for it. Sure, in Vietnam they use Zalo, and other places have a few other local players. But most of the famous US tech apps are dominant.
Is the EU the outlier here? No. Everywhere else US tech dominates. Meta, Netflix, Apple, Google, Uber, Spotify, Microsoft, Match Group, Paypal, Amazon, and on and on. They don't just dominate the EU, they dominate the world.
Except for the countries I named above, where at least some of the markets that US big tech competes in, instead have bigger local players. And even there, guess what?
Their market share is almost 1:1 linearly correlated to the degree of protectionism in those countries, all the way from China, then Korea, then India/Japan, and then everywhere else! Who woulda thought!
Why does Korea have much less US tech dominance than, say, Germany? Despite German companies theoretically having a big advantage: the German public is 100x more privacy conscious than the Korean one, and much less trusting of US companies.
I can tell you that it's not less regulations; Korea's GDPR is much more onerous than the EU's and so are investment regulations. On every single regulatory aspect, German software startups have it easier. But they were never protected. US tech was allowed to waltz in, dump their products - that's what they did, it's hilarious how now China "dumping" EVs and solar is suddenly an issue when it's exactly the strategy that US tech continues to this day; the AI companies are doing it right now! And the Korean companies were protected. Both by the rules burden, that local companies had to deal with too, along with intentional protectionism.
When it comes to solar and EVs, we all understand that a foreign country dumping their goods kills local industry. It's the exact same with software.
But then half of HN has millions on the bank exactly thanks to the above - this is where all those fat SV salaries have come from - so I do get the lack of desire to understand it.
Are the solar panels and EVs 'dumped' or are they just actually cheaper to produce? I would argue its the latter. Sure there is some state investment in the supply chain, so it is in Europe. Sure the are EV subsidies and green energy subsidies, but so does Europe have them.
Fundamentally BYD cars are cheaper because China has localized the complete supply Chain or has very good raw materials import and local refinement capability. BYD invested themselves and spend 20-25 years vertically integrating while European companies put out huge dividend and miss major technology trends.
The EV market in China was hyper competitive with a huge number of competitors and the subsidies were strategically phased out to turn the industry competitive rather then relaying on protection.
The idea that China has enough money do 'dump' products in literally ever sector that people accuse it of 'dumping' AND at the same time have enough money for massive infrastructure programs at home seems like coping to me.
I largely agree with you on this. I mentioned it because of the irony when compared to US big tech, where it's never mentioned while being their entire playbook - and as you're pointing out, in reality a much better example than Chinese EVs. The whole Silicon Valley VC model (hi YC!) where we talk about "burning VC cash" - this is literally a euphemism for dumping. Subsidizing goods to make them artificially cheap, far below cost, to gain market share, establish a near-monopoly and then raise prices. Dumping at scale. Amazon, Uber, now OpenAI. The only answer to that is protectionism.
Great, you can cross Spotify off the list then or something.
> Uber is irrelevant in many places in the EU due to protectionism.
Thanks for another great example that proves the point :) Though I think there are markets where Uber Eats dominates even when Uber Taxi doesn't. Could be wrong.
> Their market share is almost 1:1 linearly correlated to the degree of protectionism in those countries
Seems like you actually believe this. I think our starting points on reality are different enough that we are not going to have a productive conversation, I wish you and other Europeans the best of luck in your protectionism-led growth strategy. Make sure to not discuss it with any pesky macroeconomists who might lead you astray. take care
Tbh, a lot of EU protectionism vs. US tech seems not to keep the competition out. In fact, with the amount of free press US startups get and the size of their coffers, they can simply roll over the local competition in EU markets most of the time.
What it's terribly good at is adding burdens that the US giants don't face early on, slowing down the early growth between 28 fragmented markets. I don't know specifically about how China works, but the question is proving product-market fit, and for that, you need a lot of users fast.
In the EU, it's a different battle country to country as the media environment, the markets, the regulation etc. are all fractured.
Is the point of these policies to pick winners? Or to upskill the creators and stimulate the economy by giving possible entrepreneurs experience Europeans can't get in big tech?
In the US, some ex-Googler might found a startup. Europe doesn't have the equivalent of FAANG. (Europe-wide companies are not quite as easy as US-wide)
Even if the super computer itself "fails", is the goal actually the secondary impacts to the economy?
(And in the US, we do our own fair share of picking winners / losers, especially in the current regime)
Please don't fulminate on HN. A sentence like "Actually nuts to me the degree to which European policymakers do not even begin to understand" is inflammatory rhetoric of the kind we're trying to avoid here on HN. The question of how countries/economic unions can funtion most effectively is a topic worthy of serious discussion, but these discussions can be far more fruitful it they're approached with curiosity rather than rage.
I literally quoted the paragraph from this link in the tweet I provided: Edit: lol, I didn't, I quoted it from a policy document, not from press release. However, my point stands:
--- start quote ---
Apply AI Strategy
The Apply AI Strategy aims to harness AI's transformative potential by driving adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture. It will also support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with their specific needs and help Industries integrate AI into their operations.
--- end quote ---
I also quoted a paragraph from a document I will find when I'm not on mobile.
> Seems like your quote was very misleading to me, so no your point doesn't stand
My quote: Cluster: for public benefit, cutting edge research in biotech, medical, robotics.
Literal quote from your link: The Apply AI Strategy aims to harness AI's transformative potential by driving adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture.
You: your quote was misleading.
I'm sorry, I don't have the time or the patience with willfully ignorant and blind people getting their interpretations from AI slop engagement farmers.
Yeah you just demonstrated how it was misleading - by omitting half the categories, especially communications and culture.
> I'm sorry, I don't have the time or the patience with willfully ignorant and blind people getting their interpretations from AI slop engagement farmers.
By funding AI slop, you're funding AI slop, not AI research, or, quote, "drive adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture"
> research works on grasping at the possible but not quite knowing how
If these are public money, you want to reduce the blind grasping
> Slop has stumbled into accidental success on a number of occasions.
So, show me these occasions where AI slop led to "transformative potential by driving adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture."
Yeah no, it's just not how it works. They're trying to support fundamental research and they have limited resources to accomplish them. Some random dude who wants to build a company that generates pretty AI pictures is just not the target audience, and he rightly got rejected.
And frankly, the dream scenario that Pieter describes where he somehow would qualify for these resources also wouldn't help kickstart the tech industry, and it's also not how it works in the states.
What does help, and what European governments (at least the one in The Netherlands that Pieter is from) actually do, is more funding for startups. If you're a startup founder in NL almost every angel you talk to has a matched funding deal with the government. That's such a smart way of keeping up with the US. Do you think US startups get free compute from the government? They don't even get subsidies most of the time. What they get is better funding because there's more capital available, and helping investors with that is exactly how you solve that.
I don't think what you're saying is inconsistent with what I'm saying. I think you are making a big deal out of the difference between state investment funds and subsidized GPUs but I think they basically work by similar mechanisms.
> What does help, and what European governments (at least the one in The Netherlands that Pieter is from) actually do, is more funding for startups. If you're a startup founder in NL almost every angel you talk to has a matched funding deal with the government. That's such a smart way of keeping up with the US.
Does government offering matched funding to investors actually help startups who are struggling to find (any) funding? If a startup can't find (any) funding, matching is irrelevant.
> Do you think US startups get free compute from the government? They don't even get subsidies most of the time. What they get is better funding because there's more capital available, and helping investors with that is exactly how you solve that.
Umm. I'm not really convinced that the political elites in Europe understand how to do any of this stuff well.
The EU Commission is appointed, not elected. Only the Parliament (MEPs) are elected.
What’s worse, the parliament cannot originate law. Only the unelected Commission can do so. And they can do it behind closed doors. This is a setup that’s ripe for corruption.
However, they're appointed by the EU Council (the heads of state, most of them elected, some appointed by a national parliament), and approved by the (elected) European Parliament.
At the cost of some transparency, this does make it possible to select a bit more for management skills instead of just campaigning skills.
The Commission is appointed by elected officials. That's the same way the US presidency works. It's also how the UK PM role works, or any minister in pretty much any democratic government. All of those are still referred to as "elected" in common tongue.
Actually it’s very different to the US presidency and UK PM.
US presidential candidates are appointed, but they must then be elected by the public.
UK PMs must be elected MPs, or at least must face an immediate by-election (by constitutional convention) if not already an MP
If back-hand deals, internal political favouritism, nepotism or opportunism lead to the appointment of an EU Commissioner there’s nothing the public can do about it.
Is this really true? Aren't the outcome of primary elections much much more important in determining who will be the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees than elected officials and party officials are?
Specifically, an unreliable source that gives fast answers to questions says that a candidate who wins enough primaries to get over half the delegates is almost certain to be the presidential nominee for his or her party.
I think you're mistaken about appointment/election:
* Citizens vote in a nationwide election every four years.
* Those votes determine electors in each state — this is part of the Electoral College system.
* The Electoral College then formally elects the president based on those state results.
* The candidate who receives at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes becomes president.
So while there’s a layer of formality through the Electoral College, the president is ultimately chosen by voters, not appointed by any government body.
* It doesn’t have ongoing powers, authority, or political discretion like a parliament or the European Council.
* It’s a one-time, ceremonial body that meets once every four years to cast votes reflecting (in nearly all cases) the popular vote results in each state.
2. Electors don’t deliberate or choose freely.
* In almost every state, electors are legally bound (or at least politically bound) to vote according to their state’s popular vote.
* So the outcome is functionally determined by voters, not by an independent decision of the Electoral College.
3. The EU analogy misrepresents the role of the Electoral College.
* In the EU, citizens elect national governments, which then appoint members of the European Council, who negotiate and nominate the EU Commission — a genuine appointment process.
* In the U.S., the electors are not government officials making appointments; they are agents executing the people’s will as expressed in the election.
---
In the US, the people elect the President, because electors vote as their state’s voters directed.
The EU Commission analogy doesn’t fit, because that’s an appointment process made by governments, not a formalization of a direct vote.
Now you're moving the goal posts by post-facto introducing all sorts of qualifiers.
Fact of the matter is, neither the US President nor the EU Commission are directly elected. Both are appointed with one layer of indirection between them and a direct vote.
Either we call both elected or we call both unelected. To do so for one, but not the other is anti-European propaganda.
It’s about control. It is a fundamental difference in perspective and mentality regarding control. America is or at least was largely oriented around indirect control or outcome oriented objectives, where Europe is largely oriented around direct control or prescribed objectives.
It’s also enshrined in our respective governments and the foundational philosophies that underpin them. The US Declaration of Independence sets out to describe that the natural rights of the men who created the USA are preeminent and the Constitution lists how those rights may not be infringed upon, i.e. It creates laws that binds and limits the actions of government, something that was and has never been emulated since. Where across Europe, you simply do not have anything even remotely similar and the law inversely describes what you are permitted by government to do instead.
It is effectively descriptive vs prescriptive law and underlying philosophies. It is something I have had the hardest time on occasion getting my European friends to really internalize, seemingly because it’s so contrary to what their conditioned with all their life, i.e., the government is essentially the matter that grants you what it grants you, not that you have rights that the government may not infringe upon.
But to be fair, this possibly European tendency to dominate and control what you may and may not do and when and how, is and long has been creeping into the USA too, arguably since even the 12th amendment to the Constitution and getting worse with every amendment since, layers upon layers of contradicting and conflicting flaws and bugs that will be reading their ugly heed here in about two years, when Trump may run for President again. And if you don’t think he can, you simply don’t understand what a spaghetti code the Constitution is after the 11th amendment, hack after hack building up mountains of debt that is going to come due in our lives.
Which I think many (the vast majority?) Europeans will fight you to the death to avoid admitting. The politicians just made some honest mistakes. No corruption at all. Just read the other replies in this discussion.
Wouldn't go that far. EU policymakers have good intentions, I believe - but ultimately are products of their environment and cultural inclination.
The EU is such a bizarre place because they treat capital and entrepreneurs with such massive distrust, but never really bothered getting rid of the quasi-static entrenched hierarchies from feudalism? Like I'll go to the UK or France and there will just be massive swathes of land owned by the nobility or 'former' nobility? Maybe start there but let your high-value human capital earn a good wage?
You are wrong in that you think the hierarchies stem specifically from feudalism, but you are absolutely correct in that these hierarchies exist and are deeply entrenched. Sweden and Germany have one of the lowest percentages of self-made vs. inherited fortunes in the western world. Actually some tax policies in the US enable much more upward mobility, such as real estate taxation and 401k-like vehicles.
The problem in UK cities has nothing to do with feudalism. The massive lands most of those big land owners own isn't really worth that much. The really valuable land around cities is locked up by 1960s land use and building regulation. You have incredibly valuable land not developed because it has to be 'green' but its not some ancient woodland, rather its just a bunch of grass next to a highway.
Those 1960s regulation have a 1000x larger effect then any land owners owning a bunch of unproductive farmland or highlands.
Not to say there are no issues with large land owners, but its nowhere near anywhere close to being the issue with housing prices and living cost.
The EU Parlament has it's issues, and it's atrocious how corrupt politicians like e.g. von der Laien fail upwards into leadership roles there, but they're both massively exaggerating the issues to a degree that it's hard to call the stated opinions anything but unhinged.
Its kinda like calling a Chihuahua "apex predator". completely out of touch with reality.
Okay, can you please quote me directly what I said that is unhinged/delusional or explain why he is on point that I should seek help? I think you have lost sight of that being an incredibly rude thing to say to someone, but maybe not?
Feudalism is a problem in some corners, but it's mostly a UK thing. The US has its own almost-feudalism like ownership structure (see 1980s to now wealth distribution), which is problematic, but it's not bad enough (yet) to halt the US economy.
Good to distinguish between publicly funded research models (like this one) and commercial ones (like Mistral in France). What are the chinese and usa public research models like?
I propose an European AI-only "NASA" style agency that would have a frontier LLM-"Apollo Program" goal. It would subcontract the several blocks it needs across EU member states.
Would you prefer European AI sovereignty with 15% overhead costs from geographic distribution, or 100% dependence on Nvidia/OpenAI with zero European industrial base?
If I want to use an LLM to do translation, should I use a base model or an instruction tuned version? I've had mixed results using the chat models and a simple "Translate this to <language>: "
For a 9B model like EuroLLM, fine tuning the base model is pretty viable. You don't need a lot of samples, on the order of 300 high quality examples can produce good results, and the GPU time is pretty manageable with rented GPU instances
Just the base model and a template like "English: {text}\n{language}:" can also work with a bit of filter and retry logic
No github link, high performance claim with 0 numbers. No technical details. 0 interesting link to learn more. But hey a key people page is there so that's ok.
I'm somewhat skeptical of taxpayer funded innovation. Seen a few Horizon grants from the side, as a citizen I'd prefer to not pay for them, but unfortunately can't opt out.
The vast majority of US discoveries are by immigrants using taxpayer money. AKA scientists at universities. Your media likes to give credit to the companies, but generally the companies only apply things, they rarely create new science these days.
My experience with government funding is that they apply something and won't even try to sell it because selling is hard: you don't want to know that the thing you built is lacking nor that the competition is better. Especially the academic types don't. Yet I'm paying for these guys. Also, by funding the academics they won't even need to go to the job market.. But as I paid for their education I thought I was buying people who create value.
Perhaps the above is rather harsh and it's "not that bad", my subjective experience nevertheless.
Much of the neural network work was funded by Canadian Universities, and commercialized by US companies. Even if you look just at the "Attention is all you need" paper, which is primarily by authors working at Google, most of those authors come from academia and are immigrants.
Vaswani is an Indian born computer scientist, Shazeer is US, Parmar was born in India, Uszkoreit was born in Germany, Jones was born in the UK, Gomez is British-Canadian, Kaiser is a Polish computer scientist, and Polosukhin is Ukrainian.
Almost all of these people have PhDs and Master degrees. The ROI on academia is vast for society, including European universities. The thing the US does well is capitalize on that education, and sadly also try to steal credit for it as "American exceptionalism." If Europe and other countries learn how to keep their academics and get them working in local industries, America's edge will evaporate overnight.
A major factor in European academics moving to the US is that top US institutes can charge a small fortune, and some of that gets reflected in academic salaries. Interesting move by the US government to try to put them off...
The wider availability of capital is a bigger deal though. "Attention is all you need" is available to people on other continents to read, but a computer scientist in Europe that understood exactly how big transformers were going to be and why had less chance of funding than a webdev in California with a pitchdeck full of cliches and me-too GPT wrapper for an industry they'd barely touched does today.
Right, but EU doesn't fund only research but something that (IMO) should be entirely commercial.
To be clear, I don't oppose publicly funded education (nor immigrant academics, though I don't see how this relates?). What I do oppose EU trying to compete with tech giants as if they could - the incentives are not set up right, they won't succeed and the funds will be wasted.
> I'm somewhat skeptical of taxpayer funded innovation... as a citizen I'd prefer to not pay for them, but unfortunately can't opt out.
There are a few variables here but at this point in time, private-funded innovation isn't different by much and all things considered, the difference isn't in its favor.
I wouldn't mind actually/visibly productive companies taking these grants. But I've also seen mostly research-focused (nominally) private companies who mostly live off of science grants, who don't produce nor sell much - because they don't have to.
It seems like it, in most ways, it would be bad to train on 24 separate languages. That's just 24 partitions to the data. Seems really inefficient and better to simply train in the biggest (english) and translate.
I do think this will introduce some biases that correlate with the English language. It would be interesting to see more specifically what this means. But regardless, I don't think you can produce a competitive model with such a large subdivision of training data.
nah, it's better to train on all languages. 24 partitions? you are gravely underestimating these models and how they represent things in their latents... transfers easily
If you train a model on multiple languages, you can use the model itself for translation. As well as allowing the model to naturally respond in the user's language.
Confident politics and military, meaningful future proof investments, innovation in modern tech areas like CPU/GPU, AI, EV, Mobiles, etc. there is a lot.
What else, hmmm...
Ohhh yes digitization, we "Germans" still can't let our FAXing machines go.
What we are good at, outsourcing and riding into deeper dependency of other continents.
What good does it do by having only include formal languages?
For example there’s no Russian, while there’s now at least 8 million ethnic Russians living in Europe.
As the aim of EuroLLM is to provide EU citizens with powerful and useful AI tools, it is critical that the model can also translate and answer questions in other European and non-European languages. With this in mind, we added support for 11 additional languages (Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Galician, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian).
Nothing has changed: Russia still fights the Nazis. There are countless videos of Ukrainian Nazis and even Ukrainian kids brainwashed into jumping and chanting nazi (anti-russian) chants.
tbf, the USSR fought the Nazis mainly because they didn't have much choice after Nazis turned on them a little while after they'd teamed up with those ideological enemies to invade Poland, so it's not like they hadn't put the effort into being on the wrong side of history :)
Oh, typical Ruzzian victim comlex, their brain can't understand why all their neighbors and "brother slavs" hate them, brainwashing for generations made them think in unatural logic where you need to negate anything a Ruzzian says and then you increase the probability 100 times to be the truth.
Ruzzian = a Russian Zed patriot , we use this notation to acknowledge that there still exists a small percentage of educated Russians that are not Ruscists.
As expected, Europe finally catches up to 2024 and launches an LLM that barely competes against the heavyweights.
The US and China are running rings around Europe.
Mistral is an exception as it was funded by US VCs and they are a great example showing that without VC funding, Mistral would have been begging to the EU for a microsopic grant to train a LLM worse than Llama.
Mistral is pretty much toast? Their models perform poorly and I'm not sure why anyone would use them. Maybe there is a catching up point somewhere in the future, hopefully.
Every country needs a few plumbers and carpenters whether or not they are at the forefront of technology. Some money must be spent to give academics work to do so they can sharpen up their skills and perhaps teach the next set of students who might be more commercial
If you could find one for the money, if they were happy to teach in the long term. If it wasn't better to have N for the price of 1. In other situations of import substitution I'm pretty sure people try to develop their local talent in addition to buying in experts.
Surely that would need to be both input and output. But even then you could easily get lost in translation as the intent in one language might mean slightly different thing in another. Thus you could get subpar results.
It's more like the default is to be ranked near the bottom unless your comment gets traction during the brief window of time it is ranked first for being new. Seeing your comments go splat after that window expires is not some nefarious conspiracy..
EU officials should create an environment where abundant private companies can afford to put out many great open models instead of funding some selected individuals with taxpayer money.
They almost exclusively compare their model to prior models from 2024 or older and brag about "results comparable to Gemma-2-9B". I'm not sure what I expected. The eurollm.io homepage states "EuroLLM outperforms similar-sized models", which just seems like a lie for all practical purposes
An overly charitable interpretation is that EuroLLM isn't a reasoning model and has minimal post-training, so they sought out comparisons to such models (they're still ignoring reasoning models that have non-reasoning modes)
> They almost exclusively compare their model to prior models from 2024
As another comment here noted, the title is missing (2024) - this model was released almost a year ago, last December, so it's not surprising that that's the models they compare to.
I prefer proprietary LLMs that are actually good products - byproducts of free market competition (capitalism), instead of products created from govt initiatives that lead nowhere (good).
Requires personal information to download from Huggingface. Meh. Why would I want to give them my personal data, just to be able to try the model? Then I will rather stick with other models that can be downloaded without having someone overreaching and trying to grad my info.
I thought research grants were to make novel discoveries, not to replicate what industry has long done. Unless we are at the point where we study US as an alien civilization
I asked a Finnish person how good an answer about the language example from ChatGPT was. It turned out to be a hallucination, a confidently sounding nonsense.
The quality of internet trained models degrade very fast with language material size
Hallucinations and output quality are two different problems. Hallucinations are usually expressed in perfect sounding sentences by the LLM, that's what makes it so convincing to end users.
Maybe things have improved since that time (about a year ago). But my question was along the lines of "is it true that in Finnish this word means that?" and ChatGPT promptly confirmed with nonsense
I'm in Europe and can go into my local supermarkets on Saturday and Sunday from 0900 to 2100. I can send a SEPA wire transfer on the weekend and the recipient gets it within seconds. My nearest big shopping mall (hundreds of shops) is open until 23:00 on weekends. My dentist is open on Saturdays. So yeah it works on weekends...
For those curious, the 24 official languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language.
Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are the three Uralic languages.
All the others are Indo-European, Greek being the only Hellenic one, Irish the only Celtic, the rest are Baltic, Slavic, Italic, or Germanic.
(I originally used the term Balto-Slavic, though I was unaware of some of the connotations of that term until just now. Baltic and Slavic do share a common origin, but that was a very very long time ago)
> Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language.
It's Semitic, to be precise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
Arabic, even. An outlier, as it is AFAIK the only arabic dialect that is not written with the arabic alphabet. Also it's far removed from other arabic dialects.
Maltese isn’t an Arabic dialect. Yes, the grammar and phonology and core function words derive from Arabic, but more than half of the vocabulary comes from Italian/Sicilian-North African Arabic may borrow a few words from Italian here and there (just like English does), but not >50% of their vocabulary.
By your reasoning, English isn't a Germanic language since over half of its vocabulary comes from Latin or French.
I think the family tree model of linguistic history is not very useful for English. Saying English is Germanic to the exclusion of everything else is not very useful.
The family tree model seems to assume that every language has only 1 direct ancestor. It seems to have been inspired by phylogenetic trees in biology. In phylogenetics, single-parent trees work fine because distantly related species can't breed with one other. By contrast, different languages borrow features from one another all the time. It could perhaps be useful for some languages, but not for English. I reckon.
You certainly wouldn’t call English a “dialect”
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy" -- Max Weinrich
In the Yiddish original: "אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט", see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
Best not to needle the Maltese about their army and navy. They are tiny but tough (and still significant).
So tough that "siege of Malta" needs a disambiguation page on Wikipedia.
Can’t read the Hebrew alphabet, but transliterated to Latin: “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot” - I find it fascinating that despite knowing close to zero Yiddish, it makes complete sense.. well, I know a handful of German words (which covers “mit”)… and “flot” contextually makes sense as “navy”, especially if one knows English “flotsam and jetsam” (not navy but at least nautical)
I would certainly call it a Germanic dialect.
It's not at all far removed from the North African dialects of arabic which is the dialect that it's derived from. Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
> Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
Not in my experience. Not at all actually. My experience with Arabic speakers is that they think they're understanding when you speak Maltese, because it sounds kind of familiar, but in actual fact they're not understanding much at all.
Which is not surprising after a thousand years of divergence.
Well well these Arabic speakers Tunisians and Algerians?
Oh, stop it! What are you really trying to say? 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim. Ask yourself: what is the advantage of a language over a dialect or vice versa? Why are you fighting for it (or against it)?
Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.
>'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim
It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.
>Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.
That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
> > 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim
> It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.
It's both. The idea that Ukrainian is an uneducated farmer's dialect of Russian is a common talking point in the "Greater Russia / Russkiy Mir" narrative. Conversely, asserting the status of the Ukrainian language is a big part of Ukrainian identity in the face of an imperial invasion.
> That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact. Although you can sometimes find typological criteria to further argue that a variety is a language on its own, for example there are good grammatical reasons for not counting Swiss German as a variety of German, you will also find examples the other way around where two varieties have large lexical and grammatical differences and still count as the same language.
The strongest criteria for what counts as a language are based on language origins (as opposed to typology), and these do not generally suffice or make meaningful distinctions to varieties (~dialects). Mutual comprehensibility can be very low for speakers of the same language, which is why most research focuses on varieties or on speaker groups that are of particular sociolinguistic interest.
I don't get why you talk about "academic linguistics" as if there was a non-academic one and why you think linguistics "had to pay lip service into several ideologies." What are you talking about?
It's simple: linguistics is a politicized discipline, and there's a prevailing ideogically motivated tendency to put every language and dialect on equal footing.
>As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact.
Yes, this ideologically motivated idea after enough repetitionbecame "a fact" of the field, as if describing some objective physical law, and even non-political students will be taught and stick to the same (and anybody with a dissenting opinion will be getting an earful if not committing career suicide).
This wasn't always the case, it's more so with liberalism prevailing, especially in the latter half of the 20th century.
I looked it up. It was surprising to see that it's written left to right in basically the Latin alphabet with a few changes.
Tomorrow there are elections in the Netherlands, and two parties are proposing adding Frysian to that list: https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/10/kies-voor-taal/
Best get to retraining those models.
AFAIK, they are trying to get Frisian added to the "European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages", not the official language list.
They get certain recognition, but they are not official in Europe. For example, just from Spain there are 13 languages on that list.
To be fair to the Frisians, there are around 40,000-80,000 native Irish speakers and 500,000+ native Frisian speakers.
Unfair comparison, imo. Irish (Gaelic) is a language which was intentionally suppressed for centuries.
What relevance does that have? I'd say it's more important to acknowledge the fact that there are zero Irish speakers who don't also speak English. Including it as an official EU language is an ideological project rather than a pragmatic one.
Because there is a cause to revert the intentional damage done to Irish by the former rulers of the land. With Frisian there was no resistance to it. I think official language status helps provide resources to conservationists of various languages. And trying to conserve a language most of the speakers don't care about us a lot different than trying to conserve a language people do care about but we're forced to suppress for many years so have less ability to conserve it
Irish is an official language of Ireland (there is signage and instructions in Irish up and down the Republic) , Frisian is not an official language of the Netherlands to the best of my knowledge
Irish is certainly not a robust vigorous language but your 40,000-80,000 numbers downplay it I'd suggest. Here are some statistics from Deepseek
Nothing against Irish as a language at all - I am just pointing out far more people learn Frisian as their mother tongue.
Whereas Irish seems to be heavily promoted but for whatever reason precious few people learn it as their mother tongue, and those who do so are primarily in an area where it’s always been that way. For better or worse, people are preferring to use English at home and Irish is treated like a luxury good.
> Frisian is not an official language of the Netherlands to the best of my knowledge
Sorry, but it is.
Correct. Frisia (or Fryslân) is a bilingual province. Frisian is an official language of the Netherlands. Someone called in front of a judge in the north of the Netherlands has the right to be heard in Frisian, for example.
Fun fact: villages, towns, and cities in Frisia often have names which differ in Frisian and Dutch. In those cases the signs at the place limits will have both names listed; the official one on top (which in some cases is the Dutch name (e.g., Leeuwarden/Ljouwert) and in some cases the Frisian (e.g., Gytsjerk/Giekerk)).
I really like that the intercom announcement voice in our trains (and also buses?) is bilingual.
And huh interesting, I didn't know that for some places with bilingual names, the Dutch name is official and for others the Frysian is? Who gets to decide that, the municipality?
Yep, the municipality decides on such matters. Places do still occasionally have their names changed (rarely of course, because it involves a lot of work including updating addresses), usually aligning with local use. In the case of De Westereen a name from the local dialect replaced both the Dutch and Frisian names (Zwaagwesteinde and Westerein, respectively).
In a number of cases originally Frisian names actually supplanted older Dutch names (e.g., Burgum, Grou, Eastermar, etc.), so those places have just one name in both languages (except on the Dutch language Wikipedia because of weird reasoning about allowable sources and apparently a hatred of Frisianised Dutch names).
Incorrect.
This is like saying German is an official language of Italy. It is officially recognized in specific bilingual provinces, not nation-wide.
I dunno about the situation with the languages of Italy, from a cursory glance at Wikipedia it seems a _lot_ more complicated than Frysian/Dutch in NL, so I really don't think it's anything "like saying" that.
But "official" means exactly what it means, and when I'm saying "Frysian is an official language of the Netherlands", it means that it's recognized as an official language of Netherlands, by the Dutch government. And if it was up to the provinces I dunno, but it's not. Frysian is the one that's considered one of the official languages of the Netherlands.
I also don't think comparing to Italy makes sense at all because countries are different and decide what are their official languages for very different historical reasons. For instance you can look up what Dutch government body is responsible for deciding the Frysian language is an official one in the Netherlands and why, and you will very likely find no Italian equivalent of that.
It's not really that difficult, an official language OF a country is recognized at a national level. Thus all official government communication must be issued in that language. In the Netherlands, only Dutch has that level of recognition. Same in Italy for Italian
Then there are other, regionally-rocognized language that local governments use alongside the national one (West Frysian in Friesland, German in South Tyrol, etc.), and may even enjoy a majority of speakers within those regions, but they are not "an official language OF" the wider country.
Wikipedia says it's an official language in the region, as English also is regionally, but only Dutch is an official language nationally.
Which is exactly what it says for German in Italy, mutatis mutandis.
in response to: “what language is the Constitution of the Netherlands written in?”
Deepseek answers with, “The Constitution of the Netherlands is written in Dutch.
Key Context: Frisian may be an official regional language but you're not going to convince me that it's an official language of the Netherlands. Love that I'm getting downvotes about this.The Constitution of Ireland is written in Irish and English and to the best of my knowledge where differences arise the Irish one takes precedence.
Sorry, but it isn't.
So same as Esperanto then.
As a Brit I feel very at home when hearing/reading Dutch and Frisian. It’s a reminder that England and the Low Countries share a lot of close history all the way back to Anglo-Saxon times; of being fishers, traders, burghers and mercenaries moving around the North Sea chasing opportunities, spreading and augmenting languages.
“Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk”
That’s because all those languages are all essentially rooted in the languages/dialects of the Germanic tribes. It is why the Dutch get their English name from the German for German, Deutsch; and Nederland (Neder = Low) is German/Dutch for the Lowland Deutsch.
I’m sure everyone is aware that English comes from Anglish, i.e., the Angles as in the Germanic tribe.
Deutsch is derived from proto-germanic (as best we can tell) þiudiskaz, meaning “the people” i.e., the group of the different self associating tribes. It gets far more interesting in that it seems many of the strong dialects of especially southern Germany, Austria, and England have in fact retained some very old words and pronunciations that were lost in more standardized, conformed, and perverted dialects.
Not only on the language but also in gastronomy and architecture. When I see old towns in UK I usually think about Dutch towns but just without any biking infrastructure.
Dialect of Liverpool is called scouse, after a popular local dish -> lobscouse/Labskaus is very popular (love/hate really) in northern Germany as well.
> However modern standard Dutch (Nederlands, Hollands) is based upon Franconian, rather than Saxon dialects.
> Some of these [Old Saxon] speakers took part in the Germanic conquest of England in the fifth century AD. While it is not true that English and Plattdeutsch derive completely from the same source, the Old Saxon input into Anglo-Saxon was of primary importance and this linguistic group contributed greatly to the Anglo-Saxon dialects which our English forefathers spoke.
[1]: http://www.plattmaster.de/plattoew.htm
If you've ever read anything written in old English, it's a even closer to Dutch.
Old English looks more or less like old Norse to me. Or old Scandinavian as we say in Sweden...
Old English and Old Norse are mutually intelligible (especially after you realize the precise correspondences like un- = o-). Gunnlaugs Saga explicitly says the English and Norse are of one tongue and features a Norse poet singing to an English king. As another example, Ohthere of Hålogaland (Norway) visited King Alfred's 9th century English court and simply spoke to them in his own language:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170530232902/https://blogs.bl....
> Whoever preserved this story was also curious about Ohthere’s descriptions of where the Angles had lived ‘before they came into this land’ (England). Members of Alfred's court remembered that their ancestors came from mainland Europe, and they wanted to learn more about the lands which they identified as their own places of origin.
The scribe explicitly wrote things like "he said krán which we call crein" showing they were speaking in their own languages. It's even clearer if you consider our standard Old English is West Saxon from 850 and our standard Old Norse is from 1250 in Iceland (more different than the Danish variety of most Scandinavians in England). At the same time point,they would have more similarities (8th century Danish had wír before w turned to v).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohthere_of_H%C3%A5logaland
Before the Dutch arrived would it have been something like Welsh that was spoken in England?
Anglo-Saxons not Dutch. But the short answer is yes. The word Welsh is derived from the Old English word for foreigner.
Latin would have been spoken in towns and cities but as Roman rule collapsed it was replaced by Brittonic (ancestor of Welsh), unlike in the continent where it developed into various Latin derived Romance languages.
Reading something like the Canterbury Tales is interesting as a Frisian, because old English really is close to Frisian — much closer than Dutch.
Dutch is funny - when I hear people speaking Dutch I almost feel like I should be able to understand it (but clearly as I've never learnt it, I can't).
The cadence and general way it sounds is much closer to English than any other language
Each EU country nominates one official language for the EU, otherwise we'd have Catalan, Breton, Kashubian and many more.
Well, this was 4 days ago, Spain in talks with Germany regarding the addition of official languages:
https://www.politico.eu/article/catalan-basque-galician-boos...
If you can't find a common language within your own country, you shouldn't get to be one country.
I guess you are siding with the Catalans that want to be an independent country, then.
Go back and tell the founding fathers of america that. Not everyone in america was english speakers.
No, but everyone in the US was made, practically and in some ways officially, to become an english speaker.
They're children were taught in schools that ensured that they learned English but many adult immigrants never learned to speak English. Carnegie Steel used to try to avoid having too many workers with a common language as part of a strategy to make unionization more difficult. And when Norman Borlaug was growing up in Saude, Iowa in the 1920s there were still a lot of older people around who only spoke Norweigen.
yea, when did they make the law forbidding german speakers speaking German? Which year?
I think English was not set as an official language since... Trump?
It was the de facto language, but not the official language. What was baffling.
The line between a language and a dialect is far too murky for this rule to be of any use.
They could get Austria to do it, as it presumably has a spare slot.
This raises an interesting question. Is there only one dialect of German in the LLM? My understanding is that the German German and Austrian German dialects are significantly different.
My German teacher always claimed that Swiss German and German German (Hochdeutsch) were so different that she needed subtitles to understand it, and she didn't understand why they weren't considered separate languages.
It depends. There is not one Swiss German but multiple subdialects. The language spoke around the Bern region very far away from German while the one from Zürich or Basel is much closer. Since there is no official written from they never really converged to a homogeneous language.
This sort of thing always makes me think of the English my grandmother from the foothills of the Appalachian mountains spoke. It vas very distinct from standard American English.
They really are very, very different. Knowledge of one helps with the other, but it's far more than just "a couple of weeks to adjust to the accent", for example.
EDIT: It's worth noting that this is mostly a spoken thing, AIUI - most formal/semi-formal writing would be in Hochdetusch rather than a local dialect.
Even Swabian, a dialect spoken mostly in Germany, is almost unintelligible to non-native speakers when spoken by the natives of a certain age.
Unless you're thinking of one of the other Swiss languages, Swiss German is actually a variety of Hochdeutsch.
Historically, Germany used to be divided into countless small fiefdoms and each of them used to speak unique barely intelligible languages.
Hochdeutsch is in opposition to Niederdeutsch which Dutch and arguably English are a variety of.
They are in fact considered separate languages.
Yes but in practice pretty much the same except for some local changes in grammar and vocabulary, in written form.
The dialects are a whole other thing though.
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I'm specifically talking about colloquial Swiss German -- which is, I assume, what you mean by "the dialects" -- and not about Swiss Standard German, which is indeed very similar to German Standard German and can't be considered a different language.
Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, unless the latter switches to standard German (which is a foreign language for them, though one they have to learn from age 6).
> Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, unless the latter switches to standard German (which is a foreign language for them, though one they have to learn from age 6).
I presume they also pick up a lot of standard German in the media: there's lots of German movies, and Germany has the biggest movie dubbing industry in the world, too. There's some Swiss German media, but not nearly as much as there's on offer in standard German.
The same could be said of all Chinese dialects, which are also formally considered separate languages by all linguists.
They are considered separate languages in the same way that Chinese “dialects” are considered separate languages.
Some Chinese dialects are a lot further apart than eg English and German. They are mostly called 'Chinese dialects' rather than languages for political reasons. Gotta project that unity.
Yes. That was the point I was implying :)
Try dutch, it is combination of German and English!
This, but with something oddly french about it, at least in the way it sounds.
As a native french speaker, no other language gives me that "why don't I understand what they say... oh, right, that's not my language!" feeling. Something with frequencies used, I suppose, but it always puzzles me.
If Switzerland was in the EU, it would certainly be made a separate official language.
When spoken? Almost certainly. But I think they mostly write in Hochdeutsch, especially in formal contexts, at least that I've seen (private chats/etc are a totally different matter), so I don't foresee any major issues there.
Austrian standard german is slightly different from the German variant, even when written. The differences are pretty minor, though, so it’s very possible to have a relatively long text without being able to tell which one it actually is (especially when potatoes are not referenced in it).
Well, even without any government mandates, ChatGPT is very happy to give you lots of dialects of English (and many other languages, too). Just ask for it.
Eg it does a passable impression of Singapore's Singlish.
Not a native, but from what I understand, austrian german is pretty similar to what is spoken in southern Germany, but northern germany is significantly different.
Is English a legacy official language then from the time the UK was a member (I‘m guessing Ireland nominated Irish instead of English). Aside it feels very un-EU to push this limitation, as I was under the assumption that EU was all about celebrating (European) diversity.
Still an official language, thankfully. Officially, because of Cyprus.
Malta and ireland
But if you’re only allowed one official language to add to the mix, they’d surely pick Maltese and Irish.
The history here is more complex than that… originally Irish was not an EU language because Ireland just used English… then as part of one the cycles of EU treaty renegotiation, Ireland successfully pushed for it to be made a secondary EU language… and then later successfully pushed for it to be upgraded to full status… so Ireland actually has two EU languages, their original one (English) and their newer one (Irish). Because the practical reality is everyone in Ireland is fluent in English-around 60% of Irish people can’t even speak basic Irish, and fluent Irish speakers is <10% of the population
Also, English remains one of the main working languages of the EU bureaucracy, because for many EU states (especially in Eastern Europe) it is a more popular foreign language than the other two (French and German)-when Czech diplomats need to talk to Spanish diplomats, English is the language they choose.
This idea people have here that “each country gets to nominate a language” isn’t how it actually works. The treaties just contain a list of languages, and which languages are in the list is down to diplomatic negotiations not any coherent principle.
Why Cyprus? Their official languages are Greek and Turkish.
Because they also recognise English and Greek's already covered by Greece.
Which country nominates English? The obvious suspects are Ireland and Malta which have nominated non English languages so it is not them.
Well I can only assume that when UK departed the EU, English wasn't removed automatically even though no country remaining in the EU nominates it as their official language of choice.
Irish and English are both official languages in the Republic of Ireland. Irish is the first official language and English being the second.
https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2003/act/32/enacted/en/p...
Read the comment I replied to?
It says that each country can only request ONE language. And Ireland requested Irish.
The UK was not a founding member of the EEC which preceded it, I don't know and haven't easily been able to find out, but it wouldn't be that surprising if the European Parliament already used English as a common language for policy etc.
(In fact to strengthen that probability, if it had been say French, when and why would it have switched go English? Just because the UK joined?)
Including the nasty political side-show that is Ulster Scots - literally only brought in as a chilling effect 'whataboutism' to diminish support when Irish speakers ask for language rights in Northern Ireland.
https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1fivtob/no...
Well Scots is a real language. As much as English or any other. Whether enough people speak it especially in NI to justify it having an official status and such is another matter.
This completely ignores the history of published writing in Ulster Scots going back centuries.
This is one of those topics where the Hacker News take is unlikely to be correct. There's a lot of strong feeling here, and an outsider would need at least three books to understand the historical context (one of which, afaict, has not been written yet: it's oral tradition only).
People closer to the issue are better-placed to gather the necessary information, but again: strong feeling. Most people find it hard to get past that. The most informed person I know is so biased that I don't at all trust their conclusions.
What do you think is the Hacker News take?
Part of the issue some people take with Ulster-Scots is that the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature, which English speakers can easily read and understand. It's often made up of slang terms and archaic spelling, in an attempt to be as different as possible to English. Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them.
> the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature
Does modern English read like historical English?
> Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them.
Sure, there are tonnes of issues with the "officialisation" of any language but the fact that there are "native speakers" involved in the debate strongly suggests it wasn't all just made up for political reasons, which was the point I was responding to.
>Does modern English read like historical English?
If you can read and understand text from the 18th century, then yes. We're not talking about Middle English or Old English.
>but the fact that there are "native speakers" involved in the debate
I should have put native speakers in quotes as well. What counts as a native Ulster Scots speaker is someone who speaks English with an NI accent with some localisms thrown in.
Nobody speaks the official Ulster Scots that was invented because the Irish language was getting support and political leaders on the other side of the community felt they deserved something as well. The Protestant community in NI see it as a bit of an embarrassment.
> If you can read and understand text from the 18th century, then yes.
Yes, and I can read and understand historical Ulster Scots as well, but you were making a different point about codification/drift, no? The English I would find in those historical writings is quite different from what is being taught in schools today or recommended in style guides.
> What counts as a native Ulster Scots speaker is someone who speaks English with an NI accent with some localisms thrown in.
Then by your definition I am a native speaker. So how can we square it that you're telling me native speakers feel one way while I feel another way?
> Nobody speaks the official Ulster Scots
That's the nature of any newly codified minority language.
> The Protestant community in NI see it as a bit of an embarrassment.
There is no "protestant community" in Northern Ireland. A Dungannon farmer, an East Belfast loyalist and a BT9 lecturer will all give you very different views despite being of protestant background.
My point regarding the "official" language is that it bears little resemblance to the dialect that largely died out in the 20th century. i.e. it's a fabrication. Contrast that with the differing dialects of Irish where the grammar is identical with some variations in pronunciation.
I'm not entertaining the notion that I have to pretend you're a native speaker when you've made clear you're only identifying as such for the purpose of making an argument.
>There is no "protestant community" in Northern Ireland.
Anyone who applies for a job in NI fills out a form where they are asked if they are a member of "the Protestant community", "the Roman Catholic community" or neither. You're denying the factual existence of the different communities in NI for the purpose of winning an argument on the internet.
> My point regarding the "official" language is that it bears little resemblance to the dialect that largely died out in the 20th century i.e. it's a fabrication
Could you outline the key ways in which it differs? And say why that suggests the language was later "fabricated?"
> I'm not entertaining the notion that I have to pretend you're a native speaker when you've made clear you're only identifying as such for the purpose of making an argument.
If you won't entertain the notion that I'm a native speaker could you amend your definition of "native speaker" or explain what differentiates me from the native speakers whose complaints you referenced previously? And could you let us know where we can read about their complaints?
> Anyone who applies for a job in NI fills out a form where they are asked if they are a member of "the Protestant community", "the Roman Catholic community" or neither.
Of course you understand that the "protestant community" is not an homogenous group with shared views and opinions on these things. The reason that question is on the forms is because of historical discrimination against Catholics and the need to quantify heritage issues in order to avoid such discrimination forwards.
One protestant might feel embarrassment, another might feel pride, and another might not care at all. Suggesting there's a unified view from "the protestant community' is disingenuous.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/learning/history/state...
This will answer all your queries.
>Suggesting there's a unified view from "the protestant community' is disingenuous.
I've yet to meet a member of that community in person (now you've decided they exist) who has any interest in Ulster Scots as a language, (even people who are quite opinionated and argumentative on other NI topics). This is evident in the lack of Ulster Scots language classes. There are more Irish classes running in East Belfast than for Ulster Scots.
Outside of the political class (who are only interested in it as a means to stifle support for the Irish language) Ulster Scots advocates are exclusively found online.
> This will answer all your queries.
It doesn't. It's just an opinion piece about the use of neologisms in certain publications. It makes the same claim about incomprehensibility for native speakers but also fails to reference the voices of any actual native speakers. Who are they? Do they really complain about this as you said?
> I've yet to meet a member of that community in person who has any interest in Ulster Scots as a language
Well? I have met them. I've met lecturers at Queens such as Ivan Herbison studying the thing, I've met artists like Willie Drennan touring the country sharing contemporary poetry and song in Ulster Scots. I've met people in the countryside of Antrim not only with an interest in it, but speaking it day to day. Just because you haven't personally encountered these people doesn't mean they don't exist.
> now you've decided they exist
This is quite unfriendly. I made a clear distinction between what you were claiming--a single protestant community who are collectively embarrassed by Ulster Scots--and the collection of people with a shared background who identify as protestants for the sake of anti-discrimination laws, but who are otherwise diverse in their beliefs and opinions. To say that in so doing I somehow conceded your original claim is again disingenuous. It also seems absurd in relation to your broader point to now insist that just because some politician decided a form should say "protestant community" that that is necessarily reflective of an on-the-ground reality.
> There are more Irish classes running in East Belfast than for Ulster Scots.
By your definition of native speakers everyone in East Belfast is already brought up speaking Ulster Scots at home, so of course there's more interest in other languages. There are more people from East Belfast attending Irish classes than English classes too, it doesn't mean no one is interested in English.
You asked for opinions and you got opinions. I can't disprove your claims about who you've met and what language they were speaking. I can only say it's at odds with my experience.
>By your definition of native speakers everyone in East Belfast is already brought up speaking Ulster Scots at home
But reading and writing in it? And would they agree they're speaking Ulster Scots or would they say it's English?
>There are more people from East Belfast attending Irish classes than English classes too
Did you not learn English in school? I find it hard to believe English isn't taught in East Belfast schools. And that's not counting English as a second language classes for immigrant communities. What language is the signage in in East Belfast?
My comments are entirely aside from the dialect vs. language argument as a miniscule minority care about Ulster Scots in NI as a language in its own right - comparative even to say Cant or Shelta - versus the usual Stormont tomfoolery like 'cash for ash' scandals.
Simply put, Ulster Scots prominence in legislation is merely a reflection of bad-faith political negotiations by Unionists to degrade the status of the Irish Language Act by proxy. Anyone on the ground knows it for the dog-whistle that it is, used simply to curry favour with a particularly sectarian unionist base in as a counter to the Irish Language provisions outlined and agreed to in the Good Friday Agreement.
And that's 'curry favour' - not 'curry my yoghurt' by the way. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-29895593
This has more or less been the case ever since the forced Ulster plantations lead to the development of Ulster Scots as a defined community with resilient Protestant and unionist ties. It'd be far more credible if Fingal tried to secede from Dublin and the Republic tomorrow morning using Yola as a justification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yola_dialect
In short, the ILA and promotion of Gaeilge in the north is about trying to make some small reparation at a state level for a cultural genocide perpetrated by our Colonists, and to help re-establish the oldest written vernacular language in western Europe, dating back over 2,500 years.
The promotion of Ulster Scots however... well the Commissioner is literally called 'Commissioner for Ulster Scots and Ulster British Tradition'. This is after DUP members removed themselves from the equality and good relations group after basically fillibustering for 5 years of discussions on bi-lingual signs to force a stalemate.
https://www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/dup-stor...
> My comments are entirely aside from the dialect vs. language argument...
Ah right, I get you now! The point you're making is fair enough, apologies for drawing the labour from your to explain it so fully.
Should be noted- the Netherlands can't unilaterally make changes. Spain has been trying to push for languages to be added and hasn't had luck.
Haha I just added it as a fun fact, I don't actually believe folks will need to start retraining things, or that this is likely to be at the top of the priorities list for anyone. Party programmes are aspirational anyway.
Not sure what happened there but your link disproves your statement.
Specifically, the link says two things:
1. That 2 parties want to add *limburgish* to the list, not frisian. That's the bottom-right part of The Netherlands, about as far removed from Friesland as you can get (which is the top part of the Netherlands).
2. That one party wants to add Frisian, but, that is a one-day fly party that will cease to exist in a few hours as they will get 0 seats in this election and will presumably call it a day right after. It was a party founded to support one person and that person has quit due to workstress, and is highly unlikely to return as this _was_ his return. Their opinion used to be relevant as they had 13.3% of the seats this past session (and didn't exist before it). But, it isn't here.
Whoops yeah, misremembered - didn't reread as I posted the link. Was more of a fun off-the-cuff remark, so didn't spend too much energy on it. But yes, I meant Limburgish rather than Frisian.
Just do a 50:50 mix of the German and Dutch model weights.
Oops, accidentally made the model speak Limburgish.
I read, write and speak Maltese, AMA if you are curious about the language.
Not a question, but - Tatoeba could use your help! It is an open source (both code and data) dataset of parallel sentences and their Maltese data is very lacking. Also it’s pretty fun to just translate a bunch of random sentences into a language you speak. :-)
https://tatoeba.org/
Tunisians claim they can understand Maltese with minimum effort, is it reciprocal? How close is Maltese to arabic / tunisian dialect ?
I don't have much personal experience in attempting to communicate with arabic speakers. From others I have heard Lebanese arabic is the closest and you can have a passable conversation.
Not sure which Tunisians are claiming this but they'd definitely need a lot more than minimum effort. Maltese split off from Arabic around 1k years ago. The two languages sound pretty different, and are written with different alphabets.
As an Algerian, I can confirm that Maltese is surprisingly easy to understand. I was genuinely shocked the first time I heard it because the similarities are so obvious. Many Arabic dialects are also written using the Latin alphabet, especially online and on social media, so the different writing systems aren’t really a barrier at all.
Calling BS on this one. I'll let ChatGPT handle it... it says it better than I could:
can arabic people understand maltese?
That’s a really interesting question — and the answer is: *partially, but not easily.*
Here’s why:
### Linguistic roots
Maltese is a *Semitic language*, and its *core grammar and basic vocabulary* come from *Arabic*, specifically from *Siculo-Arabic*, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta about 1,000 years ago. Because of that, *many Maltese words sound familiar* to Arabic speakers — especially from the *Maghrebi (North African)* or *Levantine* dialects.
For example:
| Maltese | Meaning | Similar in Arabic | | ------- | ------- | ----------------- | | Dar | house | دار (dar) | | Kelb | dog | كلب (kalb) | | Seba | seven | سبعة (sabʿa) | | Xemx | sun | شمس (shams) |
### Influence from Italian and English
However, over the centuries, Maltese absorbed *a lot of Italian (especially Sicilian)* and *English* vocabulary — so modern Maltese is *a hybrid*. Roughly:
* 30–40% of its vocabulary is Semitic (Arabic origin), * 40–50% is Romance (mostly Italian/Sicilian), * and the rest is English and other sources.
That means Arabic speakers might *recognize some words and structures*, but they’ll *struggle to understand full sentences*, especially because:
* Pronunciation has changed, * Grammar evolved differently, * Many everyday words are not Arabic anymore.
### Summary
So:
* *Yes*, Maltese and Arabic share a deep connection — like cousins. * *No*, they’re *not mutually intelligible* today. An Arabic speaker might catch words here and there, but a real conversation would be hard without studying Maltese.
The above is exactly my experience with Arabic speakers by the way. Again, not surprising after 1k years of divergence.
I will let my own experience tell the story instead of chatgpt.
Tunisian dialect must have split of at the same time, because it's as far from arabic as maltese is. most arabs don't understand our dialect (fortunately we also speak standard arabic which we learn at school). I read some research saying maltese/tunisian is a separate language called lingua franca
Nice seeing you around here =) been a while !
Also lots of influence from Italian and English.
I recently discovered Maltese existed, and started learning it that day. I find it such an awesome language, and not just because of the letter Ħ
I do wonder what natives think and feel about the longevity of their language? What is taught in schools at what ages (assuming English is in the mix somewhere). Is there enough media in Maltese for Malti to go about the moderns at fully in Maltese? It’s shockingly hard to find any information on Maltese, and even harder to find content.
I’m not sure if’s dying out, or in danger thereof; if there are preservation efforts, or if there is no need.
Native Maltese speaker here. It is thought in schools alongside English, with both being official national languages. Most people locally, that are not foreign born or immigrants speak the language, and it is used in most households as the main language. But everyone grows up bilingual, as English is essential for most everything else that we do as a nation.
How are loan words viewed? Do businesses work in Maltese? Are monolingual speakers of the language regarded differently than those fluent in English? Do young people in Malta listen to Maltese music?
Maltese has been loaded with loan words since forever. 5 points if you can guess where bonġu, bravu and mappa come from. At some point there was some literary council for the language that decided that any new loan words should just be spelled phonetically. Computer became kompjuter.
Businesses do work in Maltese and English. Both are official languages. Its quite rare to encounter a business that deals near exclusively in Maltese. Many prefer Maltese but will fall back to english where necessary.
Regarding monolignual speakers, I think theres a lot of stereotypes for maltese only, english only and code switchers. I think its all a bit silly... So as long as communication can happen I don't fuss.
On Maltese music... There's a lot of low ish quality music then there's a few absolute gems. Look up The Travellers, Lapes, Jon Mallia on YouTube/Spotify.
Not sure if I should be get bonus points for that, but if mappa means map, the ultimate origin is still Semitic. Latin seem to have took the word maappa from a Canaanite language. The word mappa (and it's older version "manpa") is attested in Minshnaic Hebrew (meaning a napkin or a tablecloth), although you could say Hebrew "re-loaned" the cartographic meaning - which is much newer.
I can concur. All older words (think any word that was needed since the older generations), are Arabic based. All the numbers, all older verbs etc. 'Newer' words are latin based.
Interesting, but I get the impression that ubiquitous English loan words in seemingly every language is a lot different than loan word patterns of the past. Do you think? Maybe not?
I don't have much of an opinion I suppose english language cultural dominance has meant that newer words are just imported rather than adapted
Yes, there's plenty of Maltese spoken and listened to.
I was surprised to hear Maltese radio stations played in taxis, while visiting Malta just a few weeks back
The point of my question was to ask someone who lives there, not someone who visited
I'm actually really curious about everyday usage of the language; is code switching between English and Maltese more common than Maltese on its own? I've seen a few online communities where the vocabulary switches between Maltese and English very often which is interesting but I wonder how much of that is just online / written versus everyday speech.
Depends on where you live and how you were brought up, but for the most part code switching is default.
There was a point about 7 years ago when the overton window shifted to "speak english to strangers first" because of a large influx of foreigners who did not know the language. Since then I've met foreigners who have better Maltese than some natives.
Older folks & geriatrics will sometimes be surprised when they assume someone is foreign and they turn out to be Maltese. "int Malti??" is a statement I get often because I don't look Mediterranean despite being born here.
What is the name of Maltese in Maltese? Like “el español” in Spanish, it’s neat to know what languages call themselves
A term for that concept, by the way, is "endonym":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym
Wikipedia says it's "Malti"
Il-Malti to be precise. Il- means "the" and changes its meaning to that of the language. Malti alone would mean a Maltese person.
Source: I'm also Maltese.
The "Il" in Il-Malti is like "al" in Arabic, which Maltese is closely related to as was pointed out above.
Arabic (language): al-‘arabiyyah (الْعَرَبِيَّة).
'ish' is a pretty universal english suffix. So Spanish is just "españ-ish".
How is "Marsaxlokk" really pronounced? I've heard that word a few times, but never from a native. Google translate can't help me here, as it doesn't seem to have Maltese text-to-speech.
Read with English pronunciation, closest would be mar-sa-shlock.
From my experience it will be understood by locals when pronounced like that.
Is there any dialect of Arabic which you can understand without too much effort?
How much do you consider Maltese its own language (as opposed to a dialect of Arabic)?
From what I have heard, Lebanese Arabic is the closest, and still pretty far. Passable conversation is possible.
Maltese is definitely its own language. Arabic roots are there (theres a Semitic joke in there ) but it isn't arabic anymore. Its written left to right with a variant of the english alphabet.
Writing RTL or LTR and alphabet alone don't make a language different.
Hindi and Urdu are 90% the exact same language, and are mutually inteligible (Urdu speaker and Hindi speaker can have complete full conversation with each other) but each is written differently (one LTR the other RTL) and with different alphabets
See also Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. I also find Chinese to be interesting, e.g. Mandarin and (formal) Cantonese have a near identical written language, while the spoken language is completely different, views on whether or not those languages are different languages or dialects vary wildly.
In my books, the distinction between languages and dialects are so arbitrary that the best method is simply to ask the people that speak those languages/dialects. If they consider them to be different language (which Maltese speakers seemingly do) I call them different languages.
Mandarin-Cantonese is very interesting and a unique (to my knowledge) example where the same written language can be completely different to two different people.
I don't buy the argument of just asking the speakers. There are cultural, political, etc. reasons people may think things which don't conform with reality. Many Hindi-Urdu speakers get insulted by the reality that the languages are pretty much the same because they don't want to identify with people from another country their country is constantly at war with.
I know that the reverse understanding isn't too bad from chatting with a Saudi-born member of staff on holiday in Malta.
I don't think anyone would seriously consider it a dialect of Arabic though with its completely different alphabet and half the vocabulary and morphology coming from Italian languages/dialects, even if Malta hadn't spent the best part of a millennium trying very hard not to become part of the Arab world
Can you communicate with Maltese dogs more effectively?
Only if we have a few Maltesers first
Lithuanian and Latvian are Baltic languages. Nothing to do with Slavic...
I was thinking about separating the two groups when I was writing this but was afraid of getting too verbose, though in retrospect that probably would have made more sense regardless of the historical lineage. My apologies if this came off as inconsiderate.
I updated my original comment, and learned a good amount about that dispute as a result, so thanks for calling it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balto-Slavic_languages
See the section "historical dispute".
I think some people get touchy about them being lumped together if their last period of commonality (per the article) was 1400 BCE. For comparison, I believe all the Slavic languages were mutually intelligible around 1200 AD. But much more recently than this, in the last few centuries, there have been notable attempts by east slavs to absorb the Baltic language cultures and deny them.
I doubt that South Slavic and West/East Slavic were mutually intelligible at 1200 AD.
I doubt West and East Slavic were. But inside those geographic groups they probably were (Czech and Polish AFAIR were around that time).
I may be off by 100-200 years, but this is what I read. There were accents and regionalisms but they were all mutually intelligible.
It is an example I think of often, about how quickly languages can change. In the scale of 1000 years, a lot changes. Most of the diversity in Romance languages is from around that timescale too, it really started to diverge substantially around 900ad-1100ad.
Depends on your standards, too. Even today, any pair of slavic speakers should have a head start in understanding each other. Put them next to each other for a month and they should be talking, at least about basic everyday things.
Not quite. My anecdotal examples. I'm Polish.
I was in Crimea for about 2 weeks (in 2012) they split me Russian there. I couldn't understand a word they said. And I didn't learn to understand than for 2 weeks of travel there.
I could understand some words from Ukrainian (I traveled by train from Lviv).
Another example is Croatian, I've been there on vacation and renting a room. I couldn't understand a word they said and didn't learn any.
TlI can understand some Czech (because this is the closest language together with Slovakian to Polish) but that's it.
I wouldn't mix Slavs from different groups together. They evolved separately and are as close as English and German.
Balto-Slavic branch divides into Baltic and Slavic language groups so nothing wrong here
It is just one of the theories, there is no clear evidence to suggest that Baltic and Slavic were the same language thousands of years ago.
Well there is if you go far enough. It's just the question when did they split off from each other. However there is no question that Baltic and Slavic are more closely related to each other than any other non extinct Indo-European languages.
The fact they they are the closest surviving relatives on it own doesn't mean it makes sense to group them together (i.e. Italo-Celtic is also a theorized subgroup in a similar way but nobody is disputing that Celtic and Italic languages evolved into distinct groups).
Then there is a huge amount of missing links and unknown unknowns. e.g. Thracian and Dacian probably were also pretty close to Baltic or Slavic (maybe even closer to Baltic than Slavic is but we don't know enough about them to make any conclusive claims at all... but we at least know these languages existed)
Plenty of wrong here, considering Lithuanian and Latvian are utterly unintelligible to slavs, save for loanwords, but Slavic languages between themselves retain some level of intelligibility, which even spawned two competing constructed languages.
Yup, most of Eastern Europe are Balto-Slavic. While the division from the Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Belarussian, Ukranian, etc) is distant, they are still Slavic. From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language.
> From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language.
Well, that and Romanian. And Hungarian. And outside the EU, Albanian. And Georgian, Azeri and Armenian if you consider those Eastern Europe.
I regret being that loose with the designation :), Romanian and Hungarian are valid counter arguments.
In my mind, I was thinking of the belt of countries between Russia and Central Europe, starting from the Baltics down to the Balkan (excluding Greece).
Even by your definition, I can count at least seven countries where the official language is not Slavic. And that's not even including all the Altaic, Romance and other assortment of regional languages, many of which have some sort of official status.
Albania is not "East Europe", but South East. Same as Greece.
That's just your opinion, and the UN would disagree: https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/regional-groups#:~:text=...
Some of my fellow Romanians will also claim they're Central European, but in my mind, all the ones I listed are Eastern European countries. I'd even include Turkey and Kazakhstan in there, part of the latter is to the West of the Urals, which is what we normally consider the border between Europe and Asia.
That's cute. It is clear thats an outdated political organization and not geographical. Read at the groupings. Greece is more eastern than Albania (and it is one hour off timezone), and it says 'western' which is not the case by any geographic means.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382295560/figure/fi...
https://www.worldatlas.com/r/w960-q80/upload/03/90/9b/countr...
Albania is clearly south east europe.
And, I don't care about your random Romanian friend's anecdote.
> Albania is clearly south east europe.
Yes, it is clearly south east Europe. East.
> And, I don't care about your random Romanian friend's anecdote.
Who's my friend?
Latvian and Lithuanian are not at all Slavic.
There is a branch that contains both Baltic and Slavic languages, but there's also one that contains Albanian and Greek.
Albanian and Greek are both completely separate branches, and both unique on the tree (they don't have common cousins like the others).
There have been some attempts to tie Albanian to Germanic, or Greek, or other branches, but they all have failed.
At some point they all are Indo_european, but they split a way ago.
Hungarian too, although there’s a question about whether Hungary is Eastern or Central Europe.
“There’s a question” implies that there is a ground truth that might be discovered to resolve this rather than simply a clash of different purely arbitrary definitions of the same terms.
Not my intention. In fact my intention was the opposite: just to highlight it’s a bit of a contentious topic.
The Visegrad 4 (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)are generally taken to be "Central European". The strict East/West division is largely a product of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.
No, the distinction into West/Central/East Europe was also relevant in the centuries prior. You're right with, that East Europe starts with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
Perhaps. The UN still calls them “Eastern European” though.
Ah, yes, how could I forget! As a side note, though also Finno-Ugric then similarity in sound and appearance from Finnish or Estonian at least appears very far.
Yeah Hungarian is just a thing on its own.
> most of Eastern Europe are Balto-Slavic
and
> only Estonian is not a Slavic language.
So following this logic saying "in Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Baltic language" would make as much sense?
> Greek being the only Hellenic one
Are there really any other Hellenic languages besides Greek?
Cappadocian Greek is Greek heavily mixed with Turkish, to the extent that is arguably better viewed as a distinct Hellenic language rather than just a nonstandard Greek dialect. However, around a century ago, most Greek speakers were expelled from Turkey and deported to Greece (and the same happened in reverse, most Turkish-speakers in Greece were deported to Turkey), including almost all Cappadocian-speakers - and they and their descendants largely switched to standard modern Greek - with the result that it was long believed that Cappadocian had died out in the 1960s, although more recently it has been discovered that there remain small populations of Cappadocians in rural Greece keeping the language alive.
Seems like the model isn't limited to those though, from the paper:
> as well as some additional relevant languages (Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Galician, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian).
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16235
The paper also goes into detail on training set sources, which I feel like a curation thereof might be considered the main contribution of this publication?
Flemish? I remember watching a TV show in Flemish (Hotel Beau Séjour[0]), so it's prevalent enough to invest that kind of money into.
What about Basque? Is that too controversial?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Beau_Séjour
Flemish is more of a political construct than linguistic, it's a grouping of belgian-dutch the coastal, brabant and limburg language groups with each having their own regional dialects.
It's more than political. In speaking Flemish is to Dutch as UK English is to US English. In writing however there is no difference in spelling, but there is a difference in word choice.
Now, being from Belgium, even within that small part of the country where everybody is supposed to speak Dutch, I genuinely don't understand people from near the coast, which was about 150 miles from where I used to live.
Well yes, the dialects are very distinct linguistically, but what is often referred to as Flemish is the Dutch "tussentaal" aka "verkavelingsvlaams"[1]. That's not really a language per se, it's a regiolect of the official Dutch language, itself a Dutch variant of the Brabant dialects. The Flemish Dutch is usually used a lingua franca because the official Dutch otherwise sounds too formal (and native dialect speakers are foreign language speakers of Dutch). If I was to nominate a regional language for recognition it would more be the regional dialects like Brugs, Gents, Antwerps, Brussels Vloms, Hasselts, etc.
What I find interesting is that the differences in Flemish dialects make them much more distinct than what would normally call dialects. There are significant grammatical difference beyond the usual vocabulary differences. For instance, coastal Flemish conjugates yes and no[1], Limburgisch is a tonal language.
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tussentaal
Are you saying UK and US speak a different language? No one doubts it’s a different dialect, but we are talking about languages.
that is a political distinction
Mutual intelligibility is not a political distinction.
I think those 24 languages reflect all the languages that are official languages at country level.
So for instance, Basque is not an official language of any country (only French in France and Spanish/Castilian in Spain). Belgium's official languages are French, Dutch, and German, "Flemish" is only a local variant of Dutch (Belgian French is also only a local variant of French).
Official is a weird concept though. Turns out Dutch law never really bothered to define an official language, Dutch simply is the de facto standard and is required for a lot of things making it effectively the standard. This makes Dutch Sign Language the only language officially recognised by law. An attempt to recognise Frysian and Dutch as official languages in the constitution failed.
Sweden didn't have an "official" language before the Language Law of 2009. Five minority languages (Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, Sámi, Yiddish) were officially recognized as such since 1999.
Same situation in USA, believe it or not.
Thanks. That makes sense.
In the US, people will resort to fisticuffs, over variants of Spanish. I usually translate into Castilian Spanish, because that seems to be the equivalent of "Vanilla" Spanish. No one is really happy (except the Spaniards), but I'm not accused of favoritism.
For what it’s worth, Castilian sounds very odd to American ears. For a good time you can ask «¿en castellano?» and be met with either a blank stare or laughter.
Basque is an official language and declared as such in the Spanish constitution however restricted only to the regions that decide to apply it (Basque Country and Navarra).
If we want to go all legal, I believe that Spanish/Castilian is the only official language of the State, so at country level, with the other "Spanish languages" only official in their respective areas:
Section 3
(1) Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it.
(2) The other Spanish languages shall also be official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes.
(3) The richness of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be specially respected and protected. [1]
[1] https://www.senado.es/web/conocersenado/normas/constitucion/...
Basque is not controversial, but spoken just by very little people.
Not sure that should be the qualifier, there might be more people able to speak Basque in the world than Danish, doesn't stop Danish from being well supported.
Quick google points to about 1M Basque speakers in the EU against 5-6M Danish speakers, there's also the fact that Basque is not the only official language in the country it belongs to, and that it's in fact not spoken in the vast majority of the country.
From https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor... we can find an excerpt relating to the policy and its purpose:
>One of the EU’s founding principles is multilingualism.
>This policy aims to:
>communicating with its citizens in their own languages
>protecting Europe’s rich linguistic diversity
>promoting language learning in Europe
With this in mind, the first intention fails by an enormous margin, given that 95%+ of Spain doesn't speak an iota of Basque, the second is met handily, given the long history of the language, and I'm not sure what to think about the third, any language whatsoever would serve that purpose.
Irish would have been a better comparison. More speakers of Basque in Spain than Irish in Ireland.
like British English vs US English, Flemish is a dialect of dutch
I think sentence should be easily readable to Flemish speaker: "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
I think that sentence is easily readable for most people who speak at least one Germanic language.
It's mostly true, though, even if it's a somewhat simplified view.
Ah. That makes sense.
It's all Greek, to me...
No, that’s the other side of the continent.
I know. It was a joke.
Old-fashioned one.
Get off my lawn...
I find it interesting that Norwegian isn't on the list.
I have often joked that Norwegian is just a dialect of Swedish, but I never expected to get official validation like this!
Norwegian is not on this list, because in fact no country with Norwegian as their national language is part of the European Union at the time of writing.
"Norwegian" isn't just one unified language and Norway isn't in the EU.
That being said, the Scandinavian languages all come from old Norse, and modern national constructs aside, most of the people in the those areas descend from the same mix of Germanic tribes. There's no denying that modern-day Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are very similar.
Norway isn't in EU, though.
Norway isn't in the EU.
In Greek we call our language Hellenic, and our country Hellas. "Greek" / "Greece" don't exist in the Hellenic language.
> Γραικοί, Graikoí were an ancient Hellenic tribe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graecians
Yes it does, it was a greek colony off the southern coast of Italy, which were the primary greek connection to the romans which how the name stuck.
Much like the many names for Germany.
Why Italic as opposed to Romantic/Latin? I don't think there are any surviving not Latin branches of the Italic family are there?
Is Ireland the only country to bring in two languages, Irish/Gaelic and English? Is English an official language of any other EU countries?
English is an official EU language because Regulation 1 Article 1 says so [0] and hasn’t been changed. In practice, English is the most widely used language in EU institutions, so it would be have been silly to remove it after Brexit.
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:01...
It's a national language in Malta, making it a popular destination for "language weeks" in European schools, where English is usually a main subject.
That’s not why it is an official EU language, however.
English at this point has stopped culturally belonging to the United Kingdom and whilst one can discus it's not so very moral way of getting there, it's become the bridge language for people of different languages to communicate in, further solidified by the internet.
That said, whenever there is a language selection UI (e.g. at banking machines or institutional websites) in wider Europe that uses flags to represent languages -- probably not a good idea to start with, but very common -- the Irish tricolour should be used to indicate English rather than the UK or USA flags. (although cf Airteagal 8 of Bunreacht na hÉireann).
Relatively few people would recognize that it’s meant to stand for English (including myself), so I’m unconvinced that this would be better.
Cool, so the European Union and overlapping institutions could see this as an opportunity to promote greater public knowledge about one of their respective member states. Seems like an argument in favour of encouraging the display of a member state's flag rather than that of a non-member-state or former member state (especially given that state's history with respect to Ireland).
Using flags alone is already poor UI since there are many languages which spill across the borders into multiple member states and non-member states, and some member states with multiple official and commonly spoken languages.
But a menu item that reads: [Irish flag] (English) like one that reads [Swedish flag] (Svenska) does not seem worse than the legacy use of the UK flag or the popular use of the US one.
This is how we end up with a white box 'flag' that says 'en'
I believe Malta has English as an official language.
PS: Gaelic is a more general term for Irish and Scottish. Ireland brings specifically Irish(Gaeilge in Irish) language.
Malta has Maltese and English as official languages. I don't know what they bring to the EU list of official languages.
AFAIK Ireland only listed Gaelic as their official language with UK having English. That caused a bit of a problem during Brexit since technically English wasn't officially an EU language anymore. I guess they resolved it somehow.
From other comments, it seems many people don't realize that there are 11 more languages than these 24 official (this is mentioned in the paper):
Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Galician, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
+1
What about Basque, is it not included?
Basque doesn't seem to be but Catalan, Galician are
https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B
Maltese is derived from dialectical arabic
No Luxembourgish?
Norwegian is also included, based on the model card: https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B
Considering there are two different official written forms of Norwegian, that's not really saying enough, but I guess they mean Bokmål.
Turkish?
Is official in Northern Cyprus. But as I understand it while the whole island of Cyprus is in the EU, the state of Northern Cyprus isn’t.
Title is missing "(2024)". The 9B model was released last december[0].
0: https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm/home
>The EuroLLM Team brings together some of the brightest minds in AI including Unbabel, Instituto Tecnico Lisbon, the University of Edinburgh, Instituto de Telecommunicacoes, Université Paris-Saclay, Aveni, Sorbonne University, Naver Labs, and the University of Amsterdam.
>Europe is the only continent in the world to have a large public network of supercomputers that are managed by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). As soon as we received the EuroHPC JU access to the supercomputer, we were ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We developed the small model right away and in less than 6 months the second model was ready.
[1] https://www.eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/eurohpc-success-story-speak...
Repurposing some of that physics sim compute
>Europe is the only continent in the world to have a large public network of supercomputers that are managed by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU).
Who would have thought that Europe is the only continent to have a network of supercomputers managed by Europe⸮
This is the extent of the moat.
Aren't all frontier models already able to use all these languages? Support for specific languages doesn't need to be built in, LLMs support all languages because they are trained on multilingual data.
> because they are trained on multilingual data
But they were not trained on government-sanctioned homegrown EU data.
Who in their right mind would use this?
I'd use a model trained on a targeted and curated data set over one trained on all the crap on the internet any day.
I keep hearing that LLMs are trained on "Internet crap" but is it true? For instance we know from Anthropic copyright case that they scanned millions of books to make a training set. They certainly use Internet content for training but I'm sure it's curated to a large degree. They don't just scrap random pages and feed into LLM.
> I keep hearing that LLMs are trained on "Internet crap" but is it true?
Karpathy repeated this in a recent interview [0], that if you'd look at random samples in the pretraining set you'd mostly see a lot of garbage text. And that it's very surprising it works at all.
The labs have focused a lot more on finetuning (posttraining) and RL lately, and from my understanding that's where all the desirable properties of an LLM are trained into it. Pretraining just teaches the LLM the semantic relations it needs as the foundation for finetuning to work.
[0]: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy
"Just" is the wrong way to put it.
Pretraining teaches LLMs everything. SFT and RL is about putting that "everything" into useful configurations and gluing it together so that it works better.
> I'm sure it's curated to a large degree. They don't just scrap random pages and feed into LLM.
How would they curate it on that scale? Does page ranking (popularity) produce interesting pages for this purpose? I'm skeptical.
It is true. Datasets are somewhat cleaned, but only somewhat. When you have terabytes worth of text, there's only so much cleaning you can do economically.
We are talking about government-curated data here, the bias should be obvious. Popular LLMs still have huge bias problems but it would be way worse with only government-curated data.
The entirety of the internet vs government-sanctioned homegrown EU data.
"But they were not trained on government-sanctioned homegrown EU data."
ok what are you implying on this
Sidesteps potential legal issues probably
> But they were not trained on government-sanctioned homegrown EU data.
If none of the LLM makers used the very big corpus of EU multilingual data I have an EU regulation bridge to sell it to you
No, that's not how training works. It's not just about having an example in a given language, but also how many examples and the ratio of examples compared to other languages. English hugely eclipses any other language on most US models and that's why performance on other languages is subpar compared to performance on english.
There's actually a research showing that llms are more accurate when questions are in Polish: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01996
My first impulse is to say that some languages have better SNR on the internet. (less garbage autogenerated or SEO content compared to useful information)
I have never noticed any major difference in performance of ChatGPT between English and Spanish. The truth is that as long as the amount of training data of a given language is above some threshold, knowledge transfers between languages.
The issue starts, when an LLM's transfers knowledge between languages, even though that knowledge is not correct in that language. I have seen this with e.g. ChatGPT answers regarding laws for example where it refers to US laws when asked in German, which are obviously not relevant.
> The issue starts, when an LLM's transfers knowledge between languages, even though that knowledge is not correct in that language. I have seen this with e.g. ChatGPT answers regarding laws for example where it refers to US laws when asked in German, which are obviously not relevant.
There is no necessary correlation between language and the correct set of laws to reference. The language of the question (or the answer, if for some reason they are not the same) is an orthogonal issue to the intended scope. There is no reason US laws couldn't be the relevant to a question asked in German (and, conversely, no reason US laws couldn't be wrong for a question asked in English, even if it was specifically and distinguishably US English.)
When you ask an LLM (in German) without further clarifying your location I expect it to refer to German (or Austrian/Swiss) laws.
For most questions it does this pretty well (e.g. asking for the legal age to drink). However once the answer becomes more complex it starts to halucinate very quickly. The fact that some of the hallucinations are just translated US laws makes me think that the knowledge transfer between languages is probably not helping in instances like this.
Ratio/quantity is important, but quality is even more so.
In recent LLMs, filtered internet text is at the low end of the quality spectrum. The higher end is curated scientific papers, synthetic and rephrased text, RLHF conversations, reasoning CoTs, etc. English/Chinese/Python/JavaScript dominate here.
The issue is that when there's a difference in training data quality between languages, LLMs likely associate that difference with the languages if not explicitly compensated for.
IMO it would be far more impactful to generate and publish high-quality data for minority languages for current model trainers, than to train new models that are simply enriched with a higher percentage of low-quality internet scrapings for the languages.
Training is a very different thing. Can’t speak for European, but LLMs are often much worse in Japanese because tokenisation used Unicode and a single Japanese character often has to be represented by more than one token
I think you meant to say that tokenization is usually done with UTF-8 and a single Japanese character generally takes 3 or more code units (i.e. bytes). Unicode itself is not the culprit (in fact, even with UTF-16 tokenization, most Japanese characters would fit in a single code unit, and the ones that won't are exceedingly rare).
I have to admit I have not encountered significant mistokenization issues in Japanese, but I'm not using it on a daily basis LLMs. I'm somewhat dobutful this can be a major issue, since frontier LLMs are absolutely in love with Emoji, and Emoji requires at least 4 UTF-8 bytes, while most Japanese characters are happy with just 3 bytes.
Nope. Capability begins to degrade once you move away from english.
Plus all your T&S/AI Safety is not solved with translation, you need lexicons and data sets of examples.
Like, people use someone in Malaysia, to label the Arabic spoken by someone playing a video game in Doha - the cultural context is missing.
The best proxy to show the degree of lopsidedness was from this : https://cdt.org/insights/lost-in-translation-large-language-...
Which in turn had to base it on this: https://stats.aclrollingreview.org/submissions/linguistic-di...
From what I am aware of, LLM capability degrades once you move out of English, and many nation states are either building, or considering the option of building their own LLMs.
Not natively, they all sound translated in languages other than English. I occasionally come across French people complaining about LLMs' use of non-idiomatic French, but it's probably not a French problem at all, considering that this effort includes so many Indo-European languages.
I can at least also confirm this for German. Here is one example that is quite annyoing:
Chat GPT for example tends to start emails with "ich hoffe, es geht dir gut!", which means "I hope you are well!". In English (especially American) corporate emails this is a really common way to start an email. In German it is not as "how are you" isn't a common phrase used here.
Term support is vague. Can you do basic interaction in most other languages? Sure. Is it anywhere close to competence it has in english? No. Most models seem to just translate english responses at beginners simplistic monotone level.
European governments have huge collections of digitalised books, research, public data.
But also European culture could maybe make a difference? You can already see big differences between Grok and ChatGPT in terms of values.
If it's publicly available data, books and research, I can assure you the big models have already all been trained on it.
European culture is already embedded in all the models, unless the people involved in this project have some hidden trove of private data that they're training on which diverges drastically from things Europeans have published publicly (I'm 99.9% positive they don't...especially given Europe's alarmist attitude around anything related to data).
I think people don't understand a huge percentage of the employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. are non-US born.
Meh, it depends a lot on the dataset, which are heavily skewed towards the main languages. For example they almost always confuse Czech and Slovak and often swap one for the other in middle of chats
But the only way to unskew it is to remove main language data because there isn't really any to add, no?
You can also correctly bias your sampling so that when selecting new training instances each language is chosen equally. Generally the diversity of data is good, unless that data is "wrong" which, ironically, is probably most of the internet, but I digress.
Aren't they about as different as American English and British English?
The difference ia larger than let's say just a "dialect". They really are different languages, even though we generally understand each other quite well (younger generations less so). I've heard it's about as different as e. g. Danish and Swedish - not sure if that comparison is helpful.
The EuroLLM-9B model release is from Dec/2024, and scores just above random chance for benchmarks like MMLU-Pro (17.6%, random chance is 10%).
Comparison with similar EU models + 600 other highlights:
https://lifearchitect.ai/models-table/
Some cursory clicking about didn't reveal to me the actual corpus they used, only that it is several trillion tokens 'divided across the languages'. I'm curious mainly because Irish (among some other similarly endangered languages on the list) typically has any large corpus come from legal/governmental texts that are required to be translated. There must surely be only a relatively tiny amount of colloquial Irish in the corpus. It be interesting to see some evals in each language particularly with native speakers.
I think LLMs may be on the whole very positive for endangered languages such as Irish, but before it becomes positive I think there's an amount of danger to be navigated (see Scots Gaelic wikipedia drama for example)
In any case I think this is a great initiative.
That tracks. I learnt Gaeilge Uladh growing up and standard Irish feels like reading or writing a legal agreement compared to the spoken word…
Can you provide a link about the “Scots Gaelic Wikipedia drama” you reference? I've heard of drama related to the Scots Wikipedia but that has nothing to do with Gaelic.
My apologies, it was the Scots Wikipedia, careless of me. Link for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_Wikipedia#Controversy
I was thinking the same, why are so many superior models coming from only countries like US and China. And why are European countries not in the list other than France with Mistral. Why are so few companies in India, Japan, South Korea even close to a promising new model like what Chinese companies did ?
"Why" is a fair question but are you surprised? Europe is consistently behind in tech.
Europe has about 1.3 times the population of the USA and about 75% of the GDP yet EU tech output is a very small percentage of US tech output. We are not talking about 70, 50, 30, or even 20%. It's a drop in the bucket.
>The seven largest U.S. tech companies, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, are 20 times bigger than Europe’s seven largest, and generate 10 times more revenue.
https://eqtgroup.com/thinq/technology/why-is-europes-tech-in...
"Why" is a good question, but I definitely wouldnt expect significant competition in LLMs from Europe based on the giant tech disparity. Having 1 non-cutting edge model that isn't really competitive is pretty much what I would expect.
> The seven largest U.S. tech companies (...) are 20 times bigger than Europe’s seven largest, and generate 10 times more revenue.
I'm going to guess that this part is intentional. Europe tends to be more aggressive in enforcing antitrust laws. Economically, Europe's goal isn't to have the biggest companies but to have more smaller companies.
So you're not going to get companies like Google, but you will get companies like Proton, Spotify, Tuta, Hetzner, Mistral, Threema, Filen, Babbel, Nextcloud, CryptPad, DeepL, Vivaldi, and so on.
>I'm going to guess that this part is intentional. Europe tends to be more aggressive in enforcing antitrust laws. Economically, Europe's goal isn't to have the biggest companies but to have more smaller companies.
So is your hypothesis that the total market cap of EU tech companies is something like 50,60,70, etc. % of total US tech marketcap? Something significantly different than the ~10% implied by that figure (largest us companies 10x largest EU companies). And it's just more broadly distributed?
Hard to find data on this but this is showing EU tech market cap at 3.2T. https://www.stateofeuropeantech.com/chapters/outcomes
Whereas this is saying the US "megacaps" ($200B+) are at 21T. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/05/tech-megacaps-worth-market-c...
Which puts the entire EU tech market at 15% of the US megacaps. Not even the entire market.
European companies are smaller on average and less likely to go public in general, so market cap comparisons don’t show the whole picture. Growing big is less often seen as a goal than in the US. “Megacaps” aren’t necessarily considered a healthy thing to have.
Yes, and this all but guarantees that Europe will stay behind USA and China in their technology capabilities.
What are these capabilities?
I don't see any sense in which the EU has fewer capabilities. It has, say, a smaller number of businesses with smaller market dominance.
It isnt clear to me what capability the EU would gain by having a monopolist social network, a monopolist search engine, a monopolist advertising trader
Europe has all of those things, they just come from the US.
If it means sticking to their values, then so be it.
Antitrust laws are not the reasons for more smaller companies. Getting an antitrust case off in Europe is very hard, not US hard but still hard. The reasons are more complex then that.
Also, commercial software is consistently behind from open source.
I only use open source LLMs for writing (Qwen 32b from Groq) and open source editor of course, Emacs.
If some people can write better using commercial LLMs (and commercial editors), by all means, but they put themselves at a disadvantage.
Next step for me, is to use something open source for translation, I use Claude for the moment, and open source for programming, I use GPT curently. In less than a year I will find a satisfying solution to both of these problems. I haven't looked deep enough.
What a weird comment.
llama-3.1-70b-versatile is pretty good at translating though
As a European citizen I think it boils down to access to the capital. EU/EEA is not a country and the market is sort of fragmented. The big players are UK, France, Germany, everyone else does not have the same access to money as say in the US. Folks want to do it but there is a glass ceiling. Hence you have these collabs among large institutions to tap into funds such as from Horizon which are academic in nature and do not translate well into products.
The fun part is that people whining about not being able to raise common capital and operate across whole EU due to regulation tend to also be the most rabid opposers of any kind of common regulation that would bring whole EU into alignment and make it a less fragmented market.
Because training frontier model is expensive and only US and China have capital structure to raise tens of billions of dollars to do it.
You can easily fit below 10 billion for the whole datacenter, then you only pay for electricity + maintenance + staff. 100k GPUs cost a few billion USD, that's more than enough to train frontier models, run experiments, and serve models in the EU to start. Look at what xAI did and how much it cost them and it's more expensive to do in US than in EU.
being able to train new frontier models is the new equivalent to nuclear capabilities.
i predict at some point countries will get CIA'ed when they publish plans to build a large data center.
Similar to the time when they got CIA'ed when announcing plans for new nuclear plants.
They are already CIA'ed on a regular basis for much less than that.
EU made a >900 page law about AI and patted themselves on the back for being "the first to regulate AI" (which was not even true, China had an AI law before and it's two pages long).
This cannot be stressed enough. In my experience working in multiple tech startups in Germany, the power compliance, legal and all other 2nd line has over engineering is quite immense. Most of the time they act as a hindrance for innovation rather than a supporting factor.
This AI law is a clear example of that. Pencil pushers creating more obstacles for the sake of creating more obstacles rather than actually taking a pragmatic approach.
It's strange, my real life experience is very different than yours. Unless you're training AI to do something shady, it's really no bother at all. In fact, most of what the AI Act requires, you have to do anyway for a good model card.
I agree. And I also know how much of that experience comes from having a legal dept. that are collaborative and supportive of what the tech org wants to do. Which I suspect is quite rare.
Because the value of these models is (actually) yet to be proven. Why saturate the market with something that we already have at least one of and others are selling as a service? No model provider (including the "big ones" like OpenAI) has been able to produce a viable business case. They're all literally running on government deals and investor money.
It’s been proven that it is valuable to be able to convert English into executable code that does what is wanted.
Does it even make sense? Just use the American or Chinese ones, adjust As needed. Where’s the point in spending millions to build The same thing or worse
Now that the big bets have been made, who wants to try to compete with them?
It is interesting how much traction this 9B model is getting which is good.
Still two month earlier 19 European language model with 30B parameters got almost no mention:
https://huggingface.co/TildeAI/TildeOpen-30b
Mind you that is another open model that is begging for fine-tuning (it is not very good out of box).
The leading European ECommerce Company, Zalando with 50m users, is now using the leading European AI platform, Hopsworks, to power their real-time AI. Zalando are Databricks largest EU customer, but they are using Hopsworks instead for operational AI.
You would never hear it, though, as European IT press only promotes SV startups
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8QFiLhnuFg&feature=youtu.be
Disclaimer, i work at Hopsworks.
From the EuroLLM-9B page on hugginface;
>You need to agree to share your contact information to access this model
Is this common? I've never seen it on the site before, and it isn't on the smaller model. What are they collecting this information for?
I'm not sure which models require this and why, but I've come across it. e.g. the llama models, https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
I'm less surprised about llama having that requirement with its custom license, but EuroLLM-9B is Apache 2.0.
Yes, that's quite common.
Do they need this? Modern LLMs are trained on text in many languages and even if I throw medieval Gallician poetry at them[1] they can handle it.
[1]https://genius.com/Qntal-vedes-amigo-lyrics
Here's the models: https://huggingface.co/utter-project/models
I used the 9B Instruct version, from the small models, it was the one with the best Latvian knowledge out there, bar none. GPT-OSS 20B and Qwen3 30B A3B and similar ones weren't even close.
That said, the model itself was a little bit dumb and not something you'd really use for programming/autocomplete or tool calling or anything like that, which also presented some problems - even for processing text, if you need RAG or tool server calls, you need to use something like Qwen3 for the actual logic and then pass the contents to EuroLLM for translation/formatting with the instructions, at which point your n8n workflow looks a bit messy and also you have to run those two models instead of only one.
Meanwhile, the best cloud model for Latvian that I've found so far was Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, but obviously can't use cloud models in certain on-prem use cases.
If I ask something in Lithuanian, EuroLLM will reply in Latvian lol.
I have to specifically tell something like this: “do you known Lithuanian language”, then it starts replying in Lithuanian
It seems there is some weird grouping of the language data which LLM cannot distinguish well. I wonder if it is the same for other similar languages like scandinavian or western slavic
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While grant process in EU isn't fun, I think Levels has bit of an ego issues. He mentioned that if he had issues like that on eg X, he would see Elon himself in the replies.
While he is great at converting his influencer status to income in his micro-SaaS projects, I don't think running ad-fueled browser games on state-sponsored super computer should be really aim of these grant programs.
Problem with these grant proposal things is that it favors established businesses over small founders. Establishes businesses have much more resources to go through all the legal / red tape issues.
I’ve seen this in practice with innovation subsidies: small startup has to spend a lot of time to go though all the hoops, taking up significant resources, to get modest compensation for actual innovative work. Larger business hires an external agency to do everything for them, to make silly proposals “convert website from jquery to react” as innovation, and gets thousands upon thousands of FTE-hours in subsidy compensation hours for it.
this! it favors established business with legal teams and (maybe more importantly) with connections.
The EU is also great at creating a heavy regulatory environment. Which entrenches existing incumbents. So the EU creates barriers that favor big companies, then tries to fix it with grants that... also favor big companies.
And then everyone's surprised that there's no innovation in Europe.
From all the world's companies worth over 100B$ there's only one European company - SAP, founded 50 years ago. [1]
[1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corpora...
>From all the world's companies worth over 100B$ there's only one European company - SAP
Would you rather have an economy of SAPs or an economy of Teslas?
I'd rather have no economy at all
I have seen a lot of successful European startups over the years. They just get bought by the US eventually.
In part probably because it's harder to become a monopoly in the EU.
Sounds like it does not favour mega-corporations at least then? That sounds like a desirable outcome to me.
>this! it favors established business with legal teams and (maybe more importantly) with connections.
This x2. A close friend of mine works at a major EU HW tech company and his job is wearing a suit, going to dinner parties and rubbing shoulders with high level local and national bureaucrats to convince them to fund X, Y, Z projects, none of which result in any major commercial success or ROI for the governments because the money they get is not enough to make new successful products, but hey, he's loving his job which gives him amazing job security against the waves of layoffs the company went through due to falling of sales, plus the networking he gets out of that is invaluable.
So at least some people are enjoying the gravy train while it lasts. But that's why a lot of EU tech companies immediately go to the US first before opening up to the EU market. US VSs are more generous with their cheque books than EU governments and investors, plus the 300 million people single consumer market speaking English as the common language and all that.
I left a research org because it was basically a professional gatherer and spender of grants. People would make some proposal with a consortium, spend the money, write a paper or two, visit a conference in eg Japan to present it, rinse and repeat. Hated that. Nothing to do with real innovation.
He is 100% right on this one. From personal experience trying to figure out EU. Lawyer bureaucrats manage funds behind red tape clearly meant to be for their pals.
All these while the EU is running out of funds and in a process of de-industrialization. There should be an independent corruption investigation on Brussels.
I took part in application for EU grants a few times and our company group did it many times over the years.
It's bureaucracy, often bordering with stupidity. You may need advisors to navigate all their forms & processes. But it certainly isn't "pals-only" type of deal.
On the other hand - is it harder than getting VC funding? For seasoned founder with reputation - probably. For fresh startup - probably not.
Reviewer (Scientific Expert) for the EU (since 2009) here.
The probability of getting a Horizon Europe grant allegedly (not official stats) is about 8.5% according to some friends, which may seem low. You need to write 70 pages following a Word template and the key goal is to cover answers to a large number of questions. Each proposal gets various grades across a range of dimensions, which get added up and if you obtain at least 13 out of a possible 15 points, you are eligible to get funded, read: "You will get funded if there is enough money." Often, there are several proposals that justly achieve 15/15, and because of that, many prosals that have 14 points and all proposals that have less may not get funded, simply because there just is not enough total funding available to fund all the technically eligible proposals. Having judged many proposals in AI / ML / search / "big data" / language technology etc. I recommend optimizing recall, i.e. aspiring completeness.
The application process is not easy, but you can get help: there are support agency in each member country, free online Webinars to help, hotline help desks as well as an ecosystem of paid consultants that typically charge about 3k€ to vet a proposal for you if you need that kind of service (I never used it).
The process is neutral and conducted professionally and with external oversight (consultants are hired as "rapporteurs" that report on process/procedural integrity in additional to the actual reviewers). I value the research officers of the EC as people of high competency, integrity and motivation (research money is tax payers money so it should be spent carefully).
In comparison, VC (and even more so business angel) funding is achievable with much less formal apparatus, often a short business plan and a convincing slide deck and demo can get people to a partner meeting if the time is right. But the criteria and process are much different, and ideas ready for public research grants are typically too early for VCs (but the EC wants to foster the creation VC-funded startups resulting from the disseminated research).
Someone should build a startup that uses the EuroLLM to generate EU funding proposals.
Can you confirm (or not) the mandatory female co-founder? I could swear I read it. Or could it be another EU fund?
None I've seen had such requirement. There's ton of them though, with lot of flexibility on country level.
https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-funding-opportunities/eic-accel...
> The EIC welcomes applications from innovators in all EU Member States and countries associated to the Horizon Europe programme. It particularly welcomes applications from startups and SMEs with female CEOs.
So that's one that strongly pushes that angle. But the one I saw I clearly remember saying "female co-founder", not CEO.
Some, not all, grant programs cater to female founders or teams with a female.
> For fresh startup - probably not.
highly doubt, the whole thing about the success of the US west coast is that they are&were willing to fund unproven upstarts.
Right but if we do this with public funds then the narrative shifts to "OMG the EU is so corrupt and stupid, looking they're pouring taxpayer dollars into unproven stuff! They're deindustrializing!!"
The point being that, as soon as public dollars are on the table, people expect perfection. Anything less is waste, fraud, and abuse.
There's literally no winning. Want to make sure the money is allocated right? Bureaucracy. Want to not do that? Waste, fraud, and abuse.
The winning move is that governments should do government stuff and private capital should do private capital stuff. Startups belong to the latter.
> Startups belong to the latter.
Except that Apple, Intel, Tesla, etc have all received US government investment [1]. TSMC is a product of the Taiwanese state! Government investment can be done well, and seeds excellent companies.
[1]: https://www.sba.gov/blog/2024/2024-02/white-house-sba-announ...
Denmark has a large hearing aids industry due to lots of government funding for hearing aids, and a large wind turbine industry due to funding for wind farms. So stimulating demand can work to build or strengthen an industry, but what Denmark and EU are doing with GPUs is stimulating supply in Europe and demand in the US. I would be surprised if that does not end up strengthening US and not EU industry.
I wouldn't count the wind turbine industry in the same category as startups, energy production and infrastructure are classical government investment schemes.
It doesn't matter if government funded startups have been successful. It's not the government's job to provide capital to high risk ventures. They should provide public services for the people and regulate the private sector according to the interest of the people.
Well, depends on your definition of high risk. Basic research is definitely high risk, in that return for investment may happen generations from now if ever. I'd argue that funding of basic research through universities etc. is part of government's job.
And funding for basic research should be made so that the results belong to the public, for example through universities as you mentioned. Not through private startups.
I don't understand why your comment is downvoted.
The comment you're replying to is tainted with the survivorship bias. We see successful companies that got government funding, but not the opposite. Maybe we'd have more innovation and competition without government picking these specific winners.
Ironically, one of the companies you mentioned (Apple) now operates in an environment with very little competition and regularly faces antitrust claims.
Government picking winners may actually reduce competition in the long run. The key difference: when private money picks wrong, it's their loss. When government picks wrong, it's taxpayer money.
That's exactly the problem in Europe though. It's quite the opposite here.
Someone told me I needed to hire some expensive law firm in Brussels. See:
https://www.politico.eu/article/ombudsman-slams-commission-f...
Of course there is red tape. EU funding comes from taxpayer money and we want it to be spent wisely. The red tape is precisely to prevent it from being funneled to pals. EU has funded quite a few free software projects so it's not like the red tape is an insurmountable burden: https://www.ri.se/en/news/blog/europes-digital-future-spells...
I'd also say that their grants aren't unusually burdensome and grantmaking is arms length compared with a lot of other bodies.
Yes, some of the questions are weird, but I'd really rather write a bit confirming that the AI system being developed isn't going to be racist or Skynet than jump through some other hoops that exist (and that absolutely includes VC due diligence). The actual biggest issue with European funds is they get way more competent applications than they can fund anyway.
I'm actually no fan of his, so that's fine. That said, I went to the actual website he was talking about (I'm also an EU citizen) and in this case it is exactly as described and bordering comical.
It's not even close to how he described it.
There’s a screen recording at the bottom
I have the same answer as here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45735738
Fully agree with you here.
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> What's REALLY much more important though if you want to be a part of the AI race and I've posted for years here with @euaccofficial is to make Europe a really extremely attractive place to start and run an AI business. Remove regulatory obstructions and give tax discounts for startups. Let them build a business first that can compete worldwide and once they make enough money (let's say $100M/y), then slowly start adding regulation.
When you talk to most EU business owners, even in tech, the limiting factor isn't regulations. This being the #1 reason is such a tired trope.
Ironically, China has in some ways a bigger regulatory burden when it comes to software, as there if the government doesn't approve the business is dead in the water. I doubt that Klarna would've gotten off the ground there, for one, I could see them being shut down much earlier there. In the EU only now very slowly are some governments even starting to talk about some weak measures around their business model. But I've never, not once in my life, heard "Chinese software companies can't get off the ground due to the regulatory burden".
The same people who clamor about the EU regulations are the ones who hate on the EU for their protectionist measures against US tech. Yet another bout of irony here - China's software industry has flourished exactly thanks to 10 times stronger protectionist measures against US tech. So has Korea's, and their protectionism has never even been anywhere on the China level, more inbetween EU and China. No, if there's anything that would help, it's much more tech protectionism in the EU.
Pieter Levels is at the end of the day an influencer, not a serious founder.
> When you talk to most EU business owners, even in tech, the limiting factor isn't regulations.
I have a tech startup in Estonia and I agree. To me the biggest limiting factor is lack of funding.
The root cause of that is the lack of a true Capital Market union.
In the US, you can get VC across state borders and VC can invest in any US company regardless of their location. Not in the EU.
Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible. And even if managed, now that NL investor has to repeat the entire process for Poland, Spain, Malta and other countries.
EU Made Simple explains this very well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RqYws1JAuI
> Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible
If anything this would be due to Dutch regulations rather than Estonian ones. So that would be more of a problem for setting up VCs in the EU rather than attracting capital in general, as the same would apply to the rest of the world. Is it easier for a US or Singapore VC to invest in an Japanese startup vs an Estonian startup? As far as I know the answer is a "no", but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
This is because there's no unified capital market.
A texas VC can invest in a startup in Chicago and a startup in Florida can raise money from NY and so on.
> If anything this would be due to Dutch regulations rather than Estonian ones
Yes, because there's no unified capital market. You describe an effect not the cause. With 27 member states, if such regulations are bi-directional, you'd need 351 of such "regulations". If one way, you'd need 702.
In the US with 51 states, there aren't a total of 1,275 "regulation contracts" between all states, there's one, and it's federal.
I don't think you understood my point. This "disadvantage" applies the exact same way to starrups every other non-US country, it's not something specific to the EU so it makes no sense to posit it as an EU thing.
> Is it easier for a US or Singapore VC to invest in an Japanese startup vs an Estonian startup?
This was my main question, and it looks like the answer is indeed no.
I indeed missed that point.
Still, the existence of the EU is (to bring peace by) lowering, mostly economic, barriers that traditionally exist between countries.
And the comparison in this threat was "between EU and US" (in europe Thing is hard... in Europe you cannot... etc). When people use "The EU" or "Europe" in this sense, they consider it as a "Single thing". Europe, or the EU, has a great disadvantage for startups over the US. You say that is because Europe is not a "thing" like a country is. I say, that is because Europe seen as a "thing" lacks some critical infrastructure that "the thing called US" has - or even "the thing Brazil" or "China" do have, internally.
Thanks for the video!
Yep, VCs don't exist here. Plus the absurd starting costs, it's like what, 20k to set up a GmbH?
2.5k EUR in starting capital, and two founders to start a a limited liability company (AB) in Sweden, and a 240 EUR processing fee: https://verksamt.se/starta-foretag/valj-foretagsform/aktiebo...
And you register online.
Depends on the country.
Opening a company in Estonia is very cheap but in Spain the manager/CEO needs to be an "autónomo" (like a self-employed tax status). This costs thousands of Euros per year. Something like 2,400-30,000 Euros per year, every year, forever.
And that's probably one of the big obstacles in the EU: there's no common ground for these things. At least this will hopefully be addressed: https://www.reuters.com/business/eu-propose-uniform-rules-st...
What does it matter that the rules for establishing differ per country? I'm only founding in one of them.
The article is unclear, but is probably referring to making it easier for startups to offer products in other EU countries.
The idea is to establish common rules to make it easier to register and move startups between countries, among other things.
It's in very early stages, so info is very scattered. More info, for example, here: https://www.loyensloeff.com/insights/news--events/news/the-2...
So what? There's no common ground in the US either, and it's not an issue there.
The ground is significantly more common than in the EU.
And that's just one of the problems (many of the problems have nothing to do with European bureaucracy)
The global ground is even less common. In that sense it's ironic to talk about this as if it's an EU issue. Non-EU/US countries are all completely separate. The EU has much more common ground amongst each other than the other 170 or so countries that aren't EU/US; in that sense, it's an advantage for EU startups compared to startups from the other 170 countries that aren't the US. Yet it gets positioned as this unique EU disadvantage, as "the reason why EU startups are 'behind'".
I'm sure there's at least one US state where it's a pain to set up a company. So startup founders don't set up in that state but in Delaware, or recently maybe 1-2 ones. Germany is that state for the EU where it's a pain, so you set up your legal entity elsewhere.
Not needed in the beginning. You can start an UG (mini GmbH) for 1 euro and then convert it into a proper GmbH later.
In countries that have it. In Slovenia we have no such legal entity and so starting a business requires, at the very least, ~400€/month for a single proprietorship (unless you are already employed elsewhere already, then it's <100€) or even more for an LLC-type company (since it requires one fully employed person at a level above minimal wage).
Technically yes, but it costs thousands per year for upkeep and again thousands plus 1-2 years of time to shut it down again.
After waiting 3+ months for the Finanzamt to respond.
You just need to pay 60€ or so for a business license and off you go. A GmbH (a corporate structure with limited liability, somewhere between an LLC and Corp) is not needed if you want to start a) now and b) for almost zero cost.
It’s probably the people who didn’t start a business in the EU that you want to talk to. Like, I’m European, but I started my company in the US because everything is so much easier here.
Where in Europe and where in the US? You probably started one in the easiest US state to do so. Did you try starting one in the easiest EU state? Otherwise we already can't take things very seriously.
Secondly, what's easier besides VC funding? If it's VC funding, the disparity there has nothing to do with regulations - guess how much VC funding the non-EU rest of the world gets.
I’m actually bootstrapping, so the VC situation isn’t relevant to me.
It’s a distant memory to me now, I’m building a company and so much has happened that the details of this decision have faded away. But, between the AI act and GDPR, there’s a set of potential traps laid out for you to step into, along with reams of paperwork. All that requires lawyers and compliance consultants to help you figure it out, and that’s way too much for a fledgling startup.
I think it said it all that the AI regulations were written before there was really anyone to regulate. Why would I want to pour my heart and soul into a system that’s geared to find ways to stop me from building?
Anyway, it’s no longer relevant to me: I’m gone and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Hi! EU Resident here, if anything, I'd want EU protections to apply even more to US companies than they do now.
I don't want to exchange my freedoms for your shareholder value, thank you.
Which freedom for example? How is this arbitraged?
Awesome! I'm also bootstrapping. My company is set up in a place where the local version of the GPDR is significantly stricter and more onerous than the GDPR itself - yes, you heard it right, this exists! GDPR isn't even the toughest privacy laws in the world .
Yet startups here have managed to compete with US bigtech incomparably better than the EU. Shows that tough privacy laws have nothing to do with it.
> All that requires lawyers and compliance consultants to help you figure it out, and that’s way too much for a fledgling startup.
It also really just doesn't unless you're doing really shady stuff, in which case, good. The huge majority of startups don't need a lawyer to deal with GDPR.
> but I started my company in the US because everything is so much easier here
Which part is easier? That you have 50 different states with slightly varying laws to consider (e.g. Californian Data protection)? That you have a byzantine system of "benefits" to choose and manage?
And compared to where? Germany or Estonia or Sweden or Spain? The complexities will vary wildly depending on the country (kind of like in the US, where lots of companies pick the state to base themselves in based on the combination of favourable laws and precedents and taxes).
"That you have 50 different states with slightly varying laws to consider (e.g. Californian Data protection)?"
there are certain sentences you can just tell would never be written by an American lol
Got me, I'm not American, but isn't it true?
California Consumer Privacy Act is a thing you need to take into account for Californian customers.
Illinois has a Biometric Privacy Act.
And who knows what Wyoming or South Dakota or Oregon have that you might take into account if your business falls under any of them.
we might be somewhat trending in this direction, but the reality is largely that the US states are pretty identical and have very similar laws on the books. the federal government is in charge of commerce usually.
most laws like CCPA also have some threshold where you already need to be pretty successful for it to apply to you.
for some select industries (biometrics & healthcare), yes you have a patchwork of laws.
How much oversight is there and how strong is? And if you cover Califronia, New york, Texas and Florida. Would those other places really stop you, specifically if its online? And even if you get fined, how much is that fine going to be?
Because they are plenty of companies just ignoring regulation and simply paying the fines, as the enforcement often a joke.
>Because they are plenty of companies just ignoring regulation and simply paying the fines, as the enforcement often a joke.
TBH, in this respect it's much the same in the EU.
Americans are definitely aware of it in some areas, e.g. any sort of licensing.
What would you want to see changed to consider coming back?
When I got here, I realized that things are so much better here that the only thing that could get me back to Europe is a decision not to renew my visa.
> When you talk to most EU business owners, even in tech, the limiting factor isn't regulations. This being the #1 reason is such a tired trope.
Okay, what is the limiting factor? Because when I talk to EU business owners (admittedly, very few) - they point to lack of big EU capital markets, which is directly downstream of the policy environment. And when I talk to top EU human capital, they all point to the lack of competitive wages. There's a real difficulty in allocating capital to talented humans.
And, at least in Southern Europe, the income tax schedule is so aggressive it's hard to justify continuing working in many of these countries if you are highly talented.
Like, if you can tell me what the induced operator norm from l_2 -> l_2 is - probably you should come to the US and work at a biglab and make bank. What can you do in Portugal, Italy, Spain, etc.??
> Pieter Levels is at the end of the day an influencer, not a serious founder.
Sure, agreed.
I think it is a complete misreading to point to protectionism as the reason for Chinese success, but having a big unified domestic market for consumers along with massive saving rates and capital controls probably does help.
One fairly large factor is that even though English is much more common today, you just can't operate (depending on the product of course) in many countries without having customer support, documentation etc in the local language.
> Okay, what is the limiting factor
A few.
A big part is that the EU is a collection of countries that (with very few exceptions) have different languages and laws. For a company to serve Spain and France, for instance, it would need to translate everything, hire local lawyers and customer support agents. Considering the much smaller size of the countries (biggest one is 70 million vs 330 million in the US), the opportunity for "unlimited" growth is limited.
This also rebounds in the fact that when an American company makes it big, they have the resources to flood other EU markets and be cheaper/better than the local competition due to economies of scale and money based on their big successful US market. A French company making it big is still small compared to a US equivalent.
Then, there's the capital markets, no denying that. The money being thrown around the US is like nowhere else on the planet. Some of it definitely a bubble / unrealistic, but that doesn't matter. But in part it's because of the size of the total potential market that this is justified.
Education / national mythology also plays a part, I think (this is pure conjecture now). In the US, the "American Dream", "everyone can make it" etc is heavily ingrained. It propagates through the world with the help of Hollywood and other American cultural exports. In most EU countries, there isn't such a heavy emphasis on independence and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". "Hustle culture" isn't a thing. So for most people, it isn't something that comes naturally to them to start a company and work 100 hour weeks to be big and rich and successful and famous.
That's not to say there aren't such people, I went to 42 and have been to Station F and know some people in that universe. A decent proportion of my classmates wanted to make their startup and make it big, and some did end up starting their own companies.
> This also rebounds in the fact that when an American company makes it big, they have the resources to flood other EU markets and be cheaper/better than the local competition due to economies of scale and money based on their big successful US market. A French company making it big is still small compared to a US equivalent.
Ding ding ding! When China does it with solar and EVs we call it "dumping". When Uber, OpenAI and Anthropic do it, that term is never ever used. VC funded US techs dumps harder than any Chinese industry ever has.
> Considering the much smaller size of the countries (biggest one is 70 million vs 330 million in the US), the opportunity for "unlimited" growth is limited.
If you manage to get 10 million customers, your business is already successful on a gigantic scale, and you should have all the know-how in taking on the world. The success of other people is rarely the reason why you are failing in your own life. Start somewhere, do something.
> The money being thrown around the US is like nowhere else on the planet.
That's true and it's awesome. In Europe money is only thrown to real estate owners and any enterprising people with a dream are cordially invited to fucking forget about it, shut up, and fall back in line. Even if they already have a proven track record. They take their idea to the United States and are treated incredibly well in comparison. Even if their business will only be a niche business with limited reach, like 99% of businesses.
> Europe money is only thrown to real estate owners and any enterprising people with a dream are cordially invited to fucking forget about it, shut up, and fall back in line.
That's simply not true. Europe is a continent that includes startup powerhouse Sweden, UK that has a ton of them too, and France that is making massive strides (just check out Station F). It might be true in Slovakia or whatever, but you simply cannot say that broadly for the whole continent.
> That's true and it's awesome
Is it? It is to an extent, but it also encourages nonsense (Juicero, the AI spice mixer), pump and dump tech-isation of existing stuff with no business model (Wework) and outright scams (Theranos, Nikola).
If the barrier to entry to get money thrown at you is so low, a lot of it gets wasted. So the rest really really has to make it big, which gives some perverse incentives (like Uber dumping to driver old school taxis out of business to then jack up prices, because if they're not a monopoly/biggest fish in town, they wouldn't have been worth it)
Nations like Sweden and the UK might have a healthy startup scene despite not getting good help from banks and other capital institutions.
Go search the web for startup financing in Sweden. One of the big banks has a page dedicated to this - but they're not offering their own money, instead they're pointing to government grants and government lending programs.
> If the barrier to entry to get money thrown at you is so low, a lot of it gets wasted. So the rest really really has to make it big
You can't do your accounting like that. One entity does not make up for the losses of another entity. Money is cheap in the US and thrown around to bad startups and good startups. In Europe money is expensive and mostly available to governments or for real estate feudalism.
Money.
Why work in the "europoor" countries when you can go to america and earn megabucks.
That's capital markets and the lack of capital markets is because of not having business friendly environment. Consumer protections strong, pro business not so much. Companies like Spotify go to the US to IPO.
Are you saying that the other 199 non-US countries in the world all have a business unfriendly environment, since every one of them besides China has practically the same amount of software VC funding compared to the US?
All of these purported EU-specific reasons completely ignore that things are the same elsewhere. It's the US that is the outlier.
> Consumer protections strong, pro business not so much.
That's not the reason the EU has no unified capital market.
The reason is that member states are reluctant to hand over control and power to EU. Just look at e.g. Eurobonds and the shitshow around that. Especially the rise of populist anti-EU parties all over, are causing this.
Ironically, the parties that "freedom lovers" like Musk are funding and pushing, are the ones causing the EU to not function as a single capital market and "not having a business friendly environment".
> I think it is a complete misreading to point to protectionism as the reason for Chinese success, but having a big unified domestic market for consumers along with massive saving rates and capital controls probably does help.
Capital controls are protectionist measures, but anyway, no.
> Okay, what is the limiting factor?
Let's look at which countries have a significant local software industry compared to population size.
- China
- US
- Korea
- You can argue for Japan and India but that's already starting to stretch.
- Yup, effectively no where else. Even in an "out of the way" place like Myanmar everyone uses Meta, with a nice little genocide to show for it. Sure, in Vietnam they use Zalo, and other places have a few other local players. But most of the famous US tech apps are dominant.
Is the EU the outlier here? No. Everywhere else US tech dominates. Meta, Netflix, Apple, Google, Uber, Spotify, Microsoft, Match Group, Paypal, Amazon, and on and on. They don't just dominate the EU, they dominate the world.
Except for the countries I named above, where at least some of the markets that US big tech competes in, instead have bigger local players. And even there, guess what?
Their market share is almost 1:1 linearly correlated to the degree of protectionism in those countries, all the way from China, then Korea, then India/Japan, and then everywhere else! Who woulda thought!
Why does Korea have much less US tech dominance than, say, Germany? Despite German companies theoretically having a big advantage: the German public is 100x more privacy conscious than the Korean one, and much less trusting of US companies.
I can tell you that it's not less regulations; Korea's GDPR is much more onerous than the EU's and so are investment regulations. On every single regulatory aspect, German software startups have it easier. But they were never protected. US tech was allowed to waltz in, dump their products - that's what they did, it's hilarious how now China "dumping" EVs and solar is suddenly an issue when it's exactly the strategy that US tech continues to this day; the AI companies are doing it right now! And the Korean companies were protected. Both by the rules burden, that local companies had to deal with too, along with intentional protectionism.
When it comes to solar and EVs, we all understand that a foreign country dumping their goods kills local industry. It's the exact same with software.
But then half of HN has millions on the bank exactly thanks to the above - this is where all those fat SV salaries have come from - so I do get the lack of desire to understand it.
Are the solar panels and EVs 'dumped' or are they just actually cheaper to produce? I would argue its the latter. Sure there is some state investment in the supply chain, so it is in Europe. Sure the are EV subsidies and green energy subsidies, but so does Europe have them.
Fundamentally BYD cars are cheaper because China has localized the complete supply Chain or has very good raw materials import and local refinement capability. BYD invested themselves and spend 20-25 years vertically integrating while European companies put out huge dividend and miss major technology trends.
The EV market in China was hyper competitive with a huge number of competitors and the subsidies were strategically phased out to turn the industry competitive rather then relaying on protection.
The idea that China has enough money do 'dump' products in literally ever sector that people accuse it of 'dumping' AND at the same time have enough money for massive infrastructure programs at home seems like coping to me.
I largely agree with you on this. I mentioned it because of the irony when compared to US big tech, where it's never mentioned while being their entire playbook - and as you're pointing out, in reality a much better example than Chinese EVs. The whole Silicon Valley VC model (hi YC!) where we talk about "burning VC cash" - this is literally a euphemism for dumping. Subsidizing goods to make them artificially cheap, far below cost, to gain market share, establish a near-monopoly and then raise prices. Dumping at scale. Amazon, Uber, now OpenAI. The only answer to that is protectionism.
Spotify is Swedish. Uber is irrelevant in many places in the EU due to protectionism.
Great, you can cross Spotify off the list then or something.
> Uber is irrelevant in many places in the EU due to protectionism.
Thanks for another great example that proves the point :) Though I think there are markets where Uber Eats dominates even when Uber Taxi doesn't. Could be wrong.
Spotify is not a US company.
> Their market share is almost 1:1 linearly correlated to the degree of protectionism in those countries
Seems like you actually believe this. I think our starting points on reality are different enough that we are not going to have a productive conversation, I wish you and other Europeans the best of luck in your protectionism-led growth strategy. Make sure to not discuss it with any pesky macroeconomists who might lead you astray. take care
I've provided very specific cases that directly support this, you've so far provided nothing. This is a really poor comment.
You seem to have accidentally left the actual content out of your comment.
Tbh, a lot of EU protectionism vs. US tech seems not to keep the competition out. In fact, with the amount of free press US startups get and the size of their coffers, they can simply roll over the local competition in EU markets most of the time.
What it's terribly good at is adding burdens that the US giants don't face early on, slowing down the early growth between 28 fragmented markets. I don't know specifically about how China works, but the question is proving product-market fit, and for that, you need a lot of users fast.
In the EU, it's a different battle country to country as the media environment, the markets, the regulation etc. are all fractured.
> The same people who clamor about the EU regulations are the ones who hate on the EU for their protectionist measures against US tech
Bingo, my friend. And good old american exceptionalism taught since the first days of school.
Is the point of these policies to pick winners? Or to upskill the creators and stimulate the economy by giving possible entrepreneurs experience Europeans can't get in big tech?
In the US, some ex-Googler might found a startup. Europe doesn't have the equivalent of FAANG. (Europe-wide companies are not quite as easy as US-wide)
Even if the super computer itself "fails", is the goal actually the secondary impacts to the economy?
(And in the US, we do our own fair share of picking winners / losers, especially in the current regime)
Please don't fulminate on HN. A sentence like "Actually nuts to me the degree to which European policymakers do not even begin to understand" is inflammatory rhetoric of the kind we're trying to avoid here on HN. The question of how countries/economic unions can funtion most effectively is a topic worthy of serious discussion, but these discussions can be far more fruitful it they're approached with curiosity rather than rage.
What are the effects of pick the winner strategy? Sounds intriguing
Levels is engagement farming. Instead of uncritically reposting him you could've gone ahead and read what the cluster is for: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1982927767286231403
Cluster: for public benefit, cutting edge research in biotech, medical, robotics.
Levels: I want to create AI photos of people for my AI Slop startup
> Cluster: for public benefit, cutting edge research in biotech, medical, robotics.
That's not what the quoted paragraph says and you can read the whole release if you want: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
I literally quoted the paragraph from this link in the tweet I provided: Edit: lol, I didn't, I quoted it from a policy document, not from press release. However, my point stands:
--- start quote ---
Apply AI Strategy
The Apply AI Strategy aims to harness AI's transformative potential by driving adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture. It will also support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with their specific needs and help Industries integrate AI into their operations.
--- end quote ---
I also quoted a paragraph from a document I will find when I'm not on mobile.
Levels literally wants to train AI Slop: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1981499900266193028
--- start quote ---
Train a foundational model for AI photos of people
--- end quote ---
Seems like your quote was very misleading to me, so no your point doesn't stand.
> Seems like your quote was very misleading to me, so no your point doesn't stand
My quote: Cluster: for public benefit, cutting edge research in biotech, medical, robotics.
Literal quote from your link: The Apply AI Strategy aims to harness AI's transformative potential by driving adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture.
You: your quote was misleading.
I'm sorry, I don't have the time or the patience with willfully ignorant and blind people getting their interpretations from AI slop engagement farmers.
Adieu
Yeah you just demonstrated how it was misleading - by omitting half the categories, especially communications and culture.
> I'm sorry, I don't have the time or the patience with willfully ignorant and blind people getting their interpretations from AI slop engagement farmers.
Riiight.
Unfortunately the AI Slop is probably the most effective way to fund AI research right now
But the point here isn't to fund AI research, it is to use AI to benefit concrete fields.
By funding AI slop, you're funding AI slop, not AI research, or, quote, "drive adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture"
False, research works on grasping at the possible but not quite knowing how. Slop has stumbled into accidental success on a number of occasions.
> research works on grasping at the possible but not quite knowing how
If these are public money, you want to reduce the blind grasping
> Slop has stumbled into accidental success on a number of occasions.
So, show me these occasions where AI slop led to "transformative potential by driving adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture."
Knowing the outcome of research before attempting it isn’t research, it’s development.
Being honest with taxpayers about what research is is probably possible unless the population is low IQ.
Yeah no, it's just not how it works. They're trying to support fundamental research and they have limited resources to accomplish them. Some random dude who wants to build a company that generates pretty AI pictures is just not the target audience, and he rightly got rejected.
And frankly, the dream scenario that Pieter describes where he somehow would qualify for these resources also wouldn't help kickstart the tech industry, and it's also not how it works in the states.
What does help, and what European governments (at least the one in The Netherlands that Pieter is from) actually do, is more funding for startups. If you're a startup founder in NL almost every angel you talk to has a matched funding deal with the government. That's such a smart way of keeping up with the US. Do you think US startups get free compute from the government? They don't even get subsidies most of the time. What they get is better funding because there's more capital available, and helping investors with that is exactly how you solve that.
I don't think what you're saying is inconsistent with what I'm saying. I think you are making a big deal out of the difference between state investment funds and subsidized GPUs but I think they basically work by similar mechanisms.
> What does help, and what European governments (at least the one in The Netherlands that Pieter is from) actually do, is more funding for startups. If you're a startup founder in NL almost every angel you talk to has a matched funding deal with the government. That's such a smart way of keeping up with the US.
Does government offering matched funding to investors actually help startups who are struggling to find (any) funding? If a startup can't find (any) funding, matching is irrelevant.
> Do you think US startups get free compute from the government? They don't even get subsidies most of the time. What they get is better funding because there's more capital available, and helping investors with that is exactly how you solve that.
Umm. I'm not really convinced that the political elites in Europe understand how to do any of this stuff well.
See also: https://www.eib.org/en/publications/online/all/the-scale-up-...
Yeah let's start doing things like they do it in the US perhaps we can end up like them!
Others are giving you too much benefit. Without looking it up, can you tell us who "levelsio" is? How do you think you know about him?
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The EU Commission is appointed, not elected. Only the Parliament (MEPs) are elected.
What’s worse, the parliament cannot originate law. Only the unelected Commission can do so. And they can do it behind closed doors. This is a setup that’s ripe for corruption.
It's true that they are appointed.
However, they're appointed by the EU Council (the heads of state, most of them elected, some appointed by a national parliament), and approved by the (elected) European Parliament.
At the cost of some transparency, this does make it possible to select a bit more for management skills instead of just campaigning skills.
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If Elon was explicitly affirmed by a majority of congres, then that would have been similar, yes.
Trump was appointed as well by that standard. But nobody says that, that's my point. It's a double standard designed to spread FUD.
The Commission is appointed by elected officials. That's the same way the US presidency works. It's also how the UK PM role works, or any minister in pretty much any democratic government. All of those are still referred to as "elected" in common tongue.
Actually it’s very different to the US presidency and UK PM.
US presidential candidates are appointed, but they must then be elected by the public.
UK PMs must be elected MPs, or at least must face an immediate by-election (by constitutional convention) if not already an MP
If back-hand deals, internal political favouritism, nepotism or opportunism lead to the appointment of an EU Commissioner there’s nothing the public can do about it.
>The US presidential candidates are appointed
Is this really true? Aren't the outcome of primary elections much much more important in determining who will be the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees than elected officials and party officials are?
Specifically, an unreliable source that gives fast answers to questions says that a candidate who wins enough primaries to get over half the delegates is almost certain to be the presidential nominee for his or her party.
US presidents are appointed by the electoral college, not elected by the public.
I think you're mistaken about appointment/election:
* Citizens vote in a nationwide election every four years.
* Those votes determine electors in each state — this is part of the Electoral College system.
* The Electoral College then formally elects the president based on those state results.
* The candidate who receives at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes becomes president.
So while there’s a layer of formality through the Electoral College, the president is ultimately chosen by voters, not appointed by any government body.
The EC is a government body. The voters do not elect the President, they elect the EC.
The same way that voters elect their national governments, which then appoint the Commission.
1. The Electoral College isn’t a governing body.
* It doesn’t have ongoing powers, authority, or political discretion like a parliament or the European Council.
* It’s a one-time, ceremonial body that meets once every four years to cast votes reflecting (in nearly all cases) the popular vote results in each state.
2. Electors don’t deliberate or choose freely.
* In almost every state, electors are legally bound (or at least politically bound) to vote according to their state’s popular vote.
* So the outcome is functionally determined by voters, not by an independent decision of the Electoral College.
3. The EU analogy misrepresents the role of the Electoral College.
* In the EU, citizens elect national governments, which then appoint members of the European Council, who negotiate and nominate the EU Commission — a genuine appointment process.
* In the U.S., the electors are not government officials making appointments; they are agents executing the people’s will as expressed in the election.
---
In the US, the people elect the President, because electors vote as their state’s voters directed.
The EU Commission analogy doesn’t fit, because that’s an appointment process made by governments, not a formalization of a direct vote.
Now you're moving the goal posts by post-facto introducing all sorts of qualifiers.
Fact of the matter is, neither the US President nor the EU Commission are directly elected. Both are appointed with one layer of indirection between them and a direct vote.
Either we call both elected or we call both unelected. To do so for one, but not the other is anti-European propaganda.
It’s about control. It is a fundamental difference in perspective and mentality regarding control. America is or at least was largely oriented around indirect control or outcome oriented objectives, where Europe is largely oriented around direct control or prescribed objectives.
It’s also enshrined in our respective governments and the foundational philosophies that underpin them. The US Declaration of Independence sets out to describe that the natural rights of the men who created the USA are preeminent and the Constitution lists how those rights may not be infringed upon, i.e. It creates laws that binds and limits the actions of government, something that was and has never been emulated since. Where across Europe, you simply do not have anything even remotely similar and the law inversely describes what you are permitted by government to do instead.
It is effectively descriptive vs prescriptive law and underlying philosophies. It is something I have had the hardest time on occasion getting my European friends to really internalize, seemingly because it’s so contrary to what their conditioned with all their life, i.e., the government is essentially the matter that grants you what it grants you, not that you have rights that the government may not infringe upon.
But to be fair, this possibly European tendency to dominate and control what you may and may not do and when and how, is and long has been creeping into the USA too, arguably since even the 12th amendment to the Constitution and getting worse with every amendment since, layers upon layers of contradicting and conflicting flaws and bugs that will be reading their ugly heed here in about two years, when Trump may run for President again. And if you don’t think he can, you simply don’t understand what a spaghetti code the Constitution is after the 11th amendment, hack after hack building up mountains of debt that is going to come due in our lives.
JfC, this is so confidently wrong, it's absurd.
Odd that you confidently declare it as such without providing any argument whatsoever or basis of any kind at all.
> Actually nuts to me the degree to which European policymakers do not even begin to understand how to kickstart technologically-intensive industry.
Ah the good old "Europe can't do Silicon Valley" trope.
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Do share examples and evidence, by all means.
> EU is full of corruption
Which I think many (the vast majority?) Europeans will fight you to the death to avoid admitting. The politicians just made some honest mistakes. No corruption at all. Just read the other replies in this discussion.
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Please don't post ragey flamebait like this on HN. We're trying for something different here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Wouldn't go that far. EU policymakers have good intentions, I believe - but ultimately are products of their environment and cultural inclination.
The EU is such a bizarre place because they treat capital and entrepreneurs with such massive distrust, but never really bothered getting rid of the quasi-static entrenched hierarchies from feudalism? Like I'll go to the UK or France and there will just be massive swathes of land owned by the nobility or 'former' nobility? Maybe start there but let your high-value human capital earn a good wage?
You are wrong in that you think the hierarchies stem specifically from feudalism, but you are absolutely correct in that these hierarchies exist and are deeply entrenched. Sweden and Germany have one of the lowest percentages of self-made vs. inherited fortunes in the western world. Actually some tax policies in the US enable much more upward mobility, such as real estate taxation and 401k-like vehicles.
The problem in UK cities has nothing to do with feudalism. The massive lands most of those big land owners own isn't really worth that much. The really valuable land around cities is locked up by 1960s land use and building regulation. You have incredibly valuable land not developed because it has to be 'green' but its not some ancient woodland, rather its just a bunch of grass next to a highway.
Those 1960s regulation have a 1000x larger effect then any land owners owning a bunch of unproductive farmland or highlands.
Not to say there are no issues with large land owners, but its nowhere near anywhere close to being the issue with housing prices and living cost.
> France and there will just be massive swathes of land owned by the nobility or 'former' nobility
Yeah, no, this isn't even remotely true.
will cede that, you're right for France.
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Please don't post swipes like this on HN, or reply to a bad thread with more bad comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And your comment is just a totally normal way of engaging with strangers on the internet :)
Tbf, he's kinda on point.
The EU Parlament has it's issues, and it's atrocious how corrupt politicians like e.g. von der Laien fail upwards into leadership roles there, but they're both massively exaggerating the issues to a degree that it's hard to call the stated opinions anything but unhinged.
Its kinda like calling a Chihuahua "apex predator". completely out of touch with reality.
Okay, can you please quote me directly what I said that is unhinged/delusional or explain why he is on point that I should seek help? I think you have lost sight of that being an incredibly rude thing to say to someone, but maybe not?
Feudalism is a problem in some corners, but it's mostly a UK thing. The US has its own almost-feudalism like ownership structure (see 1980s to now wealth distribution), which is problematic, but it's not bad enough (yet) to halt the US economy.
And to add to your point: The UK isn't even part of the EU...
okay, fair enough - i do sometimes have wistful 'delusions' where the UK is still in the EU
I mean, yeah, his post seems like a good faith analysis without any insults.
1. It's a nice start, but the EU has to scale to Manhattan Project levels in order to properly compete with the US and China.
2. A credible scale effort for EU own silicon for AI Compute, wouldn't hurt either.
3. And this can only be achieved by vertical integration to combat fragmentation.
Good to distinguish between publicly funded research models (like this one) and commercial ones (like Mistral in France). What are the chinese and usa public research models like?
I propose an European AI-only "NASA" style agency that would have a frontier LLM-"Apollo Program" goal. It would subcontract the several blocks it needs across EU member states.
Would you prefer European AI sovereignty with 15% overhead costs from geographic distribution, or 100% dependence on Nvidia/OpenAI with zero European industrial base?
Allow me to elaborate,
EuroAI: Europe’s Moonshot to AI Sovereignty
https://open.substack.com/pub/ifiwaspolitical/p/euroai-europ...
> It's a nice start, but the EU has to scale to Manhattan Project levels in order to properly compete with the US and China.
Yep, the US-government sponsored, open-weight LLM is miles ahead of EuroLLM
You mean Meta’s Llama?
The Germans do have some neurpmorphic hardware. It might be smarter to invest in that to avoid having to build a lot of new power stations.
They are not "competing" with US and China since this is not a business venture.
2. New state-funded joint venture: EuroNV, pronounced euro-envy.
If I want to use an LLM to do translation, should I use a base model or an instruction tuned version? I've had mixed results using the chat models and a simple "Translate this to <language>: "
For a 9B model like EuroLLM, fine tuning the base model is pretty viable. You don't need a lot of samples, on the order of 300 high quality examples can produce good results, and the GPU time is pretty manageable with rented GPU instances
Just the base model and a template like "English: {text}\n{language}:" can also work with a bit of filter and retry logic
No github link, high performance claim with 0 numbers. No technical details. 0 interesting link to learn more. But hey a key people page is there so that's ok.
You don't seem to know how these models work? Check their Huggingface which IS linked there on their site.
https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B/tree/main
I'm somewhat skeptical of taxpayer funded innovation. Seen a few Horizon grants from the side, as a citizen I'd prefer to not pay for them, but unfortunately can't opt out.
The vast majority of US discoveries are by immigrants using taxpayer money. AKA scientists at universities. Your media likes to give credit to the companies, but generally the companies only apply things, they rarely create new science these days.
The above is not a discovery though.
My experience with government funding is that they apply something and won't even try to sell it because selling is hard: you don't want to know that the thing you built is lacking nor that the competition is better. Especially the academic types don't. Yet I'm paying for these guys. Also, by funding the academics they won't even need to go to the job market.. But as I paid for their education I thought I was buying people who create value.
Perhaps the above is rather harsh and it's "not that bad", my subjective experience nevertheless.
Much of the neural network work was funded by Canadian Universities, and commercialized by US companies. Even if you look just at the "Attention is all you need" paper, which is primarily by authors working at Google, most of those authors come from academia and are immigrants.
Vaswani is an Indian born computer scientist, Shazeer is US, Parmar was born in India, Uszkoreit was born in Germany, Jones was born in the UK, Gomez is British-Canadian, Kaiser is a Polish computer scientist, and Polosukhin is Ukrainian.
Almost all of these people have PhDs and Master degrees. The ROI on academia is vast for society, including European universities. The thing the US does well is capitalize on that education, and sadly also try to steal credit for it as "American exceptionalism." If Europe and other countries learn how to keep their academics and get them working in local industries, America's edge will evaporate overnight.
A major factor in European academics moving to the US is that top US institutes can charge a small fortune, and some of that gets reflected in academic salaries. Interesting move by the US government to try to put them off...
The wider availability of capital is a bigger deal though. "Attention is all you need" is available to people on other continents to read, but a computer scientist in Europe that understood exactly how big transformers were going to be and why had less chance of funding than a webdev in California with a pitchdeck full of cliches and me-too GPT wrapper for an industry they'd barely touched does today.
Right, but EU doesn't fund only research but something that (IMO) should be entirely commercial.
To be clear, I don't oppose publicly funded education (nor immigrant academics, though I don't see how this relates?). What I do oppose EU trying to compete with tech giants as if they could - the incentives are not set up right, they won't succeed and the funds will be wasted.
> I'm somewhat skeptical of taxpayer funded innovation... as a citizen I'd prefer to not pay for them, but unfortunately can't opt out.
There are a few variables here but at this point in time, private-funded innovation isn't different by much and all things considered, the difference isn't in its favor.
How about Tesla for taxpayer funded innovation? https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla
I wouldn't mind actually/visibly productive companies taking these grants. But I've also seen mostly research-focused (nominally) private companies who mostly live off of science grants, who don't produce nor sell much - because they don't have to.
How does this work?
It seems like it, in most ways, it would be bad to train on 24 separate languages. That's just 24 partitions to the data. Seems really inefficient and better to simply train in the biggest (english) and translate.
I do think this will introduce some biases that correlate with the English language. It would be interesting to see more specifically what this means. But regardless, I don't think you can produce a competitive model with such a large subdivision of training data.
nah, it's better to train on all languages. 24 partitions? you are gravely underestimating these models and how they represent things in their latents... transfers easily
If you train a model on multiple languages, you can use the model itself for translation. As well as allowing the model to naturally respond in the user's language.
> It is fully open source and available via Hugging Face.
This model was released in 2024, and I couldn't find any links to the training data - is it just an open weights model?
In this vein there's also the recent swiss Apertus.
https://www.swiss-ai.org/apertus
Their home page has link "Technical Report for EuroLLM" but links to the same page as their other link for release article on hugging face.
I suppose that's a typo and I found a technical report here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04079
Wow this site, logo and everything is so ugly. But the FAX styled photos fits well to Europe's deficit.
What deficit?
Confident politics and military, meaningful future proof investments, innovation in modern tech areas like CPU/GPU, AI, EV, Mobiles, etc. there is a lot.
What else, hmmm... Ohhh yes digitization, we "Germans" still can't let our FAXing machines go.
What we are good at, outsourcing and riding into deeper dependency of other continents.
ChatGPT is supporting all languages … not sure about the value.
Curiously, just came across this paper [0].
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01996
What good does it do by having only include formal languages? For example there’s no Russian, while there’s now at least 8 million ethnic Russians living in Europe.
From the paper:
As the aim of EuroLLM is to provide EU citizens with powerful and useful AI tools, it is critical that the model can also translate and answer questions in other European and non-European languages. With this in mind, we added support for 11 additional languages (Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Galician, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian).
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
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off topic but it’s absolutely stunning how Russia once fought the nazis and now Russia are the nazis.
I thought it was ukkraine?
Nothing has changed: Russia still fights the Nazis. There are countless videos of Ukrainian Nazis and even Ukrainian kids brainwashed into jumping and chanting nazi (anti-russian) chants.
tbf, the USSR fought the Nazis mainly because they didn't have much choice after Nazis turned on them a little while after they'd teamed up with those ideological enemies to invade Poland, so it's not like they hadn't put the effort into being on the wrong side of history :)
Indeed, we had a history teacher who used to joke about Russia being a “historical bully” in every age since they’ve been on the map.
Oh, typical Ruzzian victim comlex, their brain can't understand why all their neighbors and "brother slavs" hate them, brainwashing for generations made them think in unatural logic where you need to negate anything a Ruzzian says and then you increase the probability 100 times to be the truth.
Ruzzian = a Russian Zed patriot , we use this notation to acknowledge that there still exists a small percentage of educated Russians that are not Ruscists.
You just proved my point. You are a rusophobe.
Nope, I respect Russians and hate Ruzzians, Ruzzians hate Russians because they are not sucking Putin.
Nice, congrats. But that O looks like an ass.
That's the corporate design of the industry: Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649640
This, I hope, is close to multi-modal in lingual terms. There's potentially a lot to learn from examining where this works/fails :D
EU should focus on making an attractive startup market and more European LLMs (and so many other things) will emerge
How competitive is it performance wise to other open source models? Considering they took €50 millions in funding.
As expected, Europe finally catches up to 2024 and launches an LLM that barely competes against the heavyweights.
The US and China are running rings around Europe.
Mistral is an exception as it was funded by US VCs and they are a great example showing that without VC funding, Mistral would have been begging to the EU for a microsopic grant to train a LLM worse than Llama.
EuroLLM is not a business venture so you can only compare it to other publicly funded and developed models of the US and China.
Mistral is pretty much toast? Their models perform poorly and I'm not sure why anyone would use them. Maybe there is a catching up point somewhere in the future, hopefully.
less exposure to a technology that doesn't bring that much revenue and it's not projected to do so in the upcoming years.
yep, Europe is demonstrating the same sort of strategic thinking that economic behemoths like the Smithsonian use
Why wasting money on trying to compete at all then?
Every country needs a few plumbers and carpenters whether or not they are at the forefront of technology. Some money must be spent to give academics work to do so they can sharpen up their skills and perhaps teach the next set of students who might be more commercial
It would be a better use of the money to hire someone who has worked on actual frontier models to teach at European universities
If you could find one for the money, if they were happy to teach in the long term. If it wasn't better to have N for the price of 1. In other situations of import substitution I'm pretty sure people try to develop their local talent in addition to buying in experts.
Great job, Thank you.
We support your work and offer backup and distribution. Here a copy just in case: https://hugston.com/uploads/llm_models/EuroLLM-22B-Instruct-...
Is it planned to have a VLM or something compareable like Qwen3-VL for the future?
A multimodal release is planned.
See also Apertus: https://www.swiss-ai.org/apertus
If multi‑lang is the goal, why not translate the output of the big labs?
Surely that would need to be both input and output. But even then you could easily get lost in translation as the intent in one language might mean slightly different thing in another. Thus you could get subpar results.
Because there is always something lost in translation.
Languages don't operate one to one.
Maybe we can call it "open weights" and not open source?
Are there any benchmarks that exist for those 24 languages?
The detailed results are in appendix to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04079
It's on the huggingface readme
https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B#results
https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B#english
dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45733832
which sank to the bottom thanks to HN's invisible hand
Oh wait, one's not supposed to notice
It's more like the default is to be ranked near the bottom unless your comment gets traction during the brief window of time it is ranked first for being new. Seeing your comments go splat after that window expires is not some nefarious conspiracy..
Oh, you'd be surprised to know what's behind many of those "conspiracies"!
EU officials should create an environment where abundant private companies can afford to put out many great open models instead of funding some selected individuals with taxpayer money.
They report benchmarks on the huggingface page (https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B)
They almost exclusively compare their model to prior models from 2024 or older and brag about "results comparable to Gemma-2-9B". I'm not sure what I expected. The eurollm.io homepage states "EuroLLM outperforms similar-sized models", which just seems like a lie for all practical purposes
An overly charitable interpretation is that EuroLLM isn't a reasoning model and has minimal post-training, so they sought out comparisons to such models (they're still ignoring reasoning models that have non-reasoning modes)
> They almost exclusively compare their model to prior models from 2024
As another comment here noted, the title is missing (2024) - this model was released almost a year ago, last December, so it's not surprising that that's the models they compare to.
I'm looking to try this for ActorDO
How does it compare to Mistral’s model?
the benchmarks seems pretty bad, why should somebody use it? just because it's made in EU ?
Hopefully Albanian is added one day!
Kiváló cél, remélem sikerre viszik!
Still not open weights?
I love the website design
I prefer proprietary LLMs that are actually good products - byproducts of free market competition (capitalism), instead of products created from govt initiatives that lead nowhere (good).
Requires personal information to download from Huggingface. Meh. Why would I want to give them my personal data, just to be able to try the model? Then I will rather stick with other models that can be downloaded without having someone overreaching and trying to grad my info.
It only requires an email address.
better hand them the photo of your ID, they will create pan-EU ID for you
looks cool, i hope kagi adds it to the assistant.
Can we add Gaumais to the list? I ask Llama3 questions on how to translate french to Gaumais, it was pretty good at it.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaumais
All the different italian dialects, patois in French, schwebish...
It's just another Horizon2020 grant, people. Don't be overly harsh to a bunch of academics who are just earning their living.
I didn't know of the grant! https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/funding/funding...
It seems the new version is called Horizon Europe
I thought research grants were to make novel discoveries, not to replicate what industry has long done. Unless we are at the point where we study US as an alien civilization
Yeah people comparing this to SOTA model is too harsh
Benchmarks?
Edit: Thanks, @Bengalilol.
The 1.7B one looks meh.
But really solid numbers on the 9B! Props to the team!
1.7B
https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-1.7B#results
9B
https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B#results
Finally!
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All the models from all the big providers (even the Chinese models!) support all of these languages already.
The big win for accessibility has already been won...3 years ago.
I asked a Finnish person how good an answer about the language example from ChatGPT was. It turned out to be a hallucination, a confidently sounding nonsense.
The quality of internet trained models degrade very fast with language material size
Hallucinations and output quality are two different problems. Hallucinations are usually expressed in perfect sounding sentences by the LLM, that's what makes it so convincing to end users.
I live in Finland, ChatGPT is great at Finnish and far better at it than EuroLLM.
EuroLLM doesn't even beat the open source Gemma 2, and Gemma 3 is already out.
Maybe things have improved since that time (about a year ago). But my question was along the lines of "is it true that in Finnish this word means that?" and ChatGPT promptly confirmed with nonsense
>All the models from all the big providers (even the Chinese models!) support all of these languages already.
As a speaker of one of those languages...no, they definitely don't. You can get some words out, but it's not necessarily anything sensible
Could you adjust the title from:
"all official 24 EU languages” to "all 24 official EU languages"
The former is used on the website itself.
@dang
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Catalan is included. It's called one of the "11 additional languages" in the paper.
yeah best to lean in more on national and linguistic fragmentation, diversity has always been one of the EUs strengths
if that's the argument, let's drop all the languages and focus on english :)
You’ve got to pick one as a lingua franca. English is already popular but Spanish, French, or Esperanto would all work just fine.
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Well, one comforting point is that we are spending much less than the US.
Can't believe we wasted all that money on CERN when we could have had the best word predictor.
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I'm in Europe and can go into my local supermarkets on Saturday and Sunday from 0900 to 2100. I can send a SEPA wire transfer on the weekend and the recipient gets it within seconds. My nearest big shopping mall (hundreds of shops) is open until 23:00 on weekends. My dentist is open on Saturdays. So yeah it works on weekends...
In Flanders, northern part of Belgium, you can get next day delivery on Sundays.
This kind of comment is just trolling, no added value.
Please don't post trollish flamebait on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What's the joke here, worker rights?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13278447/german-cou...
joking about people having too many worker rights is tonally comparable to a dog that won't let a cow eat grass
Also Fridays and other days it is only between 9-15.