Friesland is working with Microsoft on Frisian spell checker for Office package

The province of Friesland is working with Microsoft on a Frisian spell checker. The hope is that it will be available to all Office users later this year. A file of 290,000 Frisian words is created for the spell checker.

That writes Omrop Fryslân. With the spell check, Deputy Sietske Poepjes hopes that Frisians are no longer afraid of making mistakes when they write in Frisian. For the spell checker, the province is working together with Microsoft and the Fryske Akademy, a foundation that is committed to research into, among other things, the Frisian language. De Leeuwarder Courant writes that the company Connected Solutions is responsible for building the software.

By this summer at the latest, people in the provincial government and at the Fryske Akademy should be able to test the new spell checker. After that, it will be released more widely via the Office package. According to Poepjes, Microsoft is ‘open to that’. Later, the province also wants to talk to Apple about introducing the spell checker on the products of that manufacturer.

It is striking that the province has already developed a Frisian spell checker, or staveringshifker. This plugin has been available since 2015. The difference between the spell checkers is that users have to download and install the Office plugin themselves. The new check is intended to be standard in Office programs. The costs of the new spell check are around 40,000 euros. In 2016, the Frisian language became available in Google Translate.