Automattic / Automattic/harper

feat: Slovak language support (sk-SK)

Open
#3,658 8 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement language-and-dialect
Dominant language
Rust
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

## Summary

Requesting Slovak (`sk-SK`) language support in Harper. As far as I can tell there is no existing issue or PR tracking Slovak specifically, so this is to track it. See also the general non-English roadmap in #2654.

## Why

Harper's speed, offline operation and privacy-first design make it very attractive for Slovak users — a niche currently served only by heavier, slower tools (LanguageTool / ltex-ls). There is no lightweight, offline grammar/spell checker for Slovak today.

## Open resources to seed it

- **Hunspell `sk_SK`** dictionary (`.aff` + `.dic`), widely packaged on Linux distros.
- **Slovak National Corpus** data and the **sk-spell** project (by Zdenko Podobný), which is also the basis of LanguageTool's Slovak spellchecker. Permissively licensed (LGPL / MPL).

## Notes on difficulty

Slovak is a West Slavic, strongly fusional language: rich nominal declension (6–7 cases × number × 3 genders, with animacy), extensive verb conjugation and aspect, and productive derivation. A plain word list won't be enough — solid morphological annotations / word-forms will matter. In terms of effort this is probably closer to the Belarusian attempt (#2195) than to the Romance/German PRs (#2150, #3402).

## How I can help

I'm happy to contribute on the non-Rust side — assembling `dictionary-sk` + annotations from the resources above. Since #2150 and #3402 are still converging on the multi-language framework, I'd appreciate guidance on the currently recommended branch/structure to target before I start.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reading the multi-language work in #2150 and #3402 and confirm with maintainers which branch and structure to target. Then examine the Hunspell sk_SK dictionary, Slovak National Corpus data, and sk-spell resources for dictionary-sk and its annotations. Done means Slovak support is assembled within the recommended framework.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
localization
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
43/100

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