CLARIN stands for 'Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure'.

It is a research infrastructure that was initiated from the vision that all digital language resources and tools from all over Europe and beyond are accessible through a 

 online environment for the support of researchers in the humanities and social sciences.

In 2012 CLARIN 

 was established and took up the mission to create and maintain an infrastructure to support the sharing, use and sustainability of language data and tools for research in the humanities and social sciences.

Currently CLARIN provides easy and sustainable access to digital language data (in written, spoken, or multimodal form) for scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and beyond.

 CLARIN also offers advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine such datasets, wherever they are located.

This is enabled through a networked federation of centres: language data repositories, service centres and knowledge centres, 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.