This paper provides an overview of the ongoing European Language Equality(ELE) project, an 18-month action funded by the European Commission which involves 52 partners. The primary goal of ELE is to prepare the European Language Equality Programme, in the form of a strategic research, innovation and implementation agenda and a roadmap for achieving full digital language equality (DLE) in Europe by 2030.

This paper introduces the concept of Digital Language Equality (DLE) developed by the EU-funded European Language Equality (ELE) project, and describes the associated DLE Metric with a focus on its technological factors (TFs), which are complemented by situational contextual factors. This work aims at objectively describing the level of technological support of all European languages and lays the foundation to implement a large-scale EU-wide programme to ensure that these languages can continue to exist and prosper in the digital age, to serve the present and future needs of their speakers. The paper situates this ongoing work with a strong European focus in the broader context of related efforts, and explains how the DLE Metric can help track the progress towards DLE for all languages of Europe, focusing in particular on the role played by the TFs. These are derived from the European Language Grid (ELG) Catalogue, that provides the empirical basis to measure the level of digital readiness of all European languages. The DLE Metric scores can be consulted through an online interactive dashboard to show the level of technological support of each European language and track the overall progress toward DLE.