Our interviews » Michel Weimerskirch

Our interview with Michel Weimerskirch

Michel Weimerskirch, what is your connection with the Luxembourgish language?

I am from Luxembourg (although I have been born in Vienna, Austria) and my native language is Luxembourgish.

What is the story of Spellchecker.lu?

Spellchecker.lu is a project dedicated to creating a free and open source spelling checker for Luxembourgish. There is an "online checker" that runs inside any modern web browser as well as extensions for several open source applications like OpenOffice.org (office suite), Mozilla Firefox (web browser), Mozilla Thunderbird (email client) as well as several others.

There used to be another project with a similar goal, financed by the government of Luxembourg. Unfortunately, the project was cancelled in 2001 and because of bureaucratic barriers it was left in a rather unusable state. At that time I basically decided that I wanted to fix this situation by creating my own spelling checker with an open source license. As I did not have the necessary knowledge back then, I had to postpone the idea for the time being.

Then, in 2005, I met two guys at university who had the same idea, so we started working together on a first "proof of concept" which was released in 2006. That first version was far from being perfect as there were a number of wrong correction suggestions as well as other teething troubles.

After finishing my bachelor studies I finally had the time to relaunch the entire project in 2008. Unfortunately my project partners were running short on time, so I basically had to continue on my own. I refurbished the logo, recreated the website and above all rebuilt the spelling dictionary from scratch. The spell checker now has a much higher quality and the project is running at full speed with new innovations coming out every few months. Among other smaller things there is now a more intelligent correction suggestion algorithm in place that basically learns from the user actions to provide more accurate results. Also, there is now a special version that runs on internet-enabled mobile devices.

Why are you interested in Luxembourgish?

I am genuinely interested in all natural languages, specifically in how they are constructed syntactically and semantically. As there are currently not many computer linguistic tools available for Luxembourgish, I thought it would be a nice initiative to start this project. And it looks like I have struck gold.

Who are the people that are using your spellchecker?

Based on the feedback that I have received so far, the spellchecker seems to be used by people of all generations. The usage statistics also tell me that it is being actively used by government and city administrations, schools as well as a few larger companies.

What have you learned about Luxembourgish?

Having a computer science background, I have learned a lot about linguistics and languages in general. I can't think of anything particular that would be worth highlighting though.

What's easy in the Luxembourgish language is...

There are only three grammatical cases, so the sentence structure is (exceptions excluded) easier than in other Germanic languages.

What's difficult in the Luxembourgish language is...

Words are pronounced very differently depending on the language that the word comes from. Additionally, there is the so-called "Eifeler Regel", which is especially difficult for non-native speakers. For the Spellchecker.lu project I have developed a special algorithm that detects and corrects the "Eifeler Regel". The algorithm is highly complex and it still sometimes fails on a few exceptions.

What is a good speller?

In my humble opinion, a good speller simply is somebody who knows his orthography and sticks to it. As there are certain words where the orthography is unclear or undefined in Luxembourgish, that definition might not be so obvious in this specific context. Thus, I might expand that definition by saying that a good speller is also somebody who keeps his spelling of "unclear" words consistent.

Luxembourgish in an ideal world...

... would be more widely used. Especially by Luxembourgish people themselves.

Your message to all those learning Luxembourgish.

Don't give up too easily: Luxembourgish is not that difficult after all. ;-)

Also, try to practise as much as possible. Talk to Luxembourgish people and tell them that you want to practise. Don't let them fall back to using your mother tongue.

Your own question and answer.

Will the Spellchecker.lu project always be free?

Yes. I created the project in order to promote written Luxembourgish so the project will stay free.