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Adding a new Language

Adding support for a new language to LanguageTool requires setting up a new Maven project. This page will guide you through all the necessary steps. It was written for software developers with Java and Maven experience. If you aren't a software developer, but are still willing to write XML rules for a new language, please ask on our forum. We will help you set up the new language so no programming will be required by you. If you are a developer, fork LanguageTool on GitHub and make the following changes in your fork. Once you've added enough error detection rules and we've checked your changes, you can send a pull request. Please note that we're only going to add a language to the official version of LanguageTool if we can assume that you will maintain that language support in the future. This means you should have maintained your fork for a few months before creating the pull request.

Note that the changes listed are just the technical changes needed so your language can be selected in LanguageTool. How useful support for the new language will depend solely on the rules you're going to write. These rules decide how many errors can actually be found and how many false alarms the system shows. Well-supported languages have more than 1000 rules in LanguageTool.

  1. Fork the code at GitHub.
  2. Clone your forked repository.
  3. Switch to the languagetool-language-modules directory.
  4. Create a new project using Maven: mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=org.languagetool -DartifactId=**xy** -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DinteractiveMode=false (replace xy with the ISO 639-1 Code of your language, or the ISO 639-3 if the later does not exist, as described in the IETF RCF 3066).
  5. Switch to the xy directory that has just been created.
  6. Copy the pom.xml for English over your pom.xml and adapt the artifactId and name elements.
  7. Now you will need to create some files - just copy them over from language-en and adapt them:
    • src/main/java/org/languagetool/language/Mylanguage.java (copy from src/main/java/org/languagetool/language/English.java, use your language's name instead of Mylanguage)
    • src/main/resources/META-INF/org/languagetool/language-module.properties (needs to point to your Mylanguage class, it will be loaded by LanguageTool at runtime to detect the supported languages)
    • src/main/resources/org/languagetool/rules/xy/grammar.xml (the main rule file, see development documentation)
    • This is a minimal setup so far. It's enough to write rules that refer to words, but not to part-of-speech tags. Add other Java classes like Tokenizers and Taggers, depending on what you need. For example, a trivial tagger that only assigns null tags to words is DemoTagger.
    • Add an entry xy = Mylanguage to languagetool-core/src/main/resources/org/languagetool/MessagesBundle.properties, with xy being your language code (e.g. fr) and Mylanguage being the language name (e.g. French)
  8. Add your language project as a dependency in languagetool-language-modules/all/pom.xml.
  9. Add <module>languagetool-language-modules/xy</module> to the top-level pom.xml
  10. Finally, run mvn clean package in the LanguageTool directory. The result in languagetool-standalone/target should now support your new language.
  11. If your language has a part-of-speech tagger, add a file resource/xy/tagset.txt that describes the tags, like this one for English does.
  12. To translate the user interface for your language, ask us to add your language at WebTranslateIt.