The Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) is a distributed Research Infrastructure that provides easy and sustainable access for scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences to FAIR digital language data − in written, spoken or multimodal form − and advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine them, independent of their location. CLARIN is building a networked federation of language data repositories, service centres and centres of expertise, with single sign-on access for all members of the academic community in all participating countries. Tools and data from different centres are interoperable, so that data collections can be combined and tools from different sources can be chained to perform complex operations to support researchers in their work.

Entered in the ESFRI Roadmap 2016, CLARIN became a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in 2012. Since then several countries have joined either as full Member, or as Observer. The ultimate goal is to include all European countries as well as any interested third countries in or outside Europe. The majority of operations, services and centres of the CLARIN infrastructure is provided and funded by CLARIN Members (and Observers). They set up a national consortium, typically consisting of universities, research institutions, libraries and public archives, of which at least one has the status of CLARIN Centre which is expected to create and provide access to digital language data collections, and digital tools and expertise for researchers to work with them.