Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate unprecedented capabilities and define the state of the art for almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks and also for essentially all Language Technology (LT) applications. LLMs can only be trained for languages for which a sufficient amount of pre-training data is available, effectively excluding many languages that are typically characterised as under-resourced. However, there is both circumstantial and empirical evidence that multilingual LLMs, which have been trained using data sets that cover multiple languages (including under-resourced ones), do exhibit strong capabilities for some of these under-resourced languages. Eventually, this approach may have the potential to be a technological off-ramp for those under-resourced languages for which "native" LLMs, and LLM-based technologies, cannot be developed due to a lack of training data. This paper, which concentrates on European languages, examines this idea, analyses the current situation in terms of technology support and summarises related work. The article concludes by focusing on the key open questions that need to be answered for the approach to be put into practice in a systematic way.

At least 21 European languages are in danger of digital extinction due to a severe lack of technology support, concluded the META-NET 2012 reports prepared by a group of more than 230 experts from all over Europe. For the past decade, the introduction of neural technologies in automatic translation has precipitated a revolution in digital language services, allowing for ever faster and more accurate automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) results. Yet, a stark imbalance persists in technology support between the five most spoken EU languages (English, French, German, Spanish and Italian), and the remaining 19 official ones. This digital inequality further increases when regional and minority languages are considered, leading to a dearth of online technological support, both in spoken (audio, video) and written (text) form. As digital services become an ever so integral part of our lives, such digital language inequalities could eventually threaten the digital survival of EU languages.