The EAGLES Spoken Language Working Group has concentrated its work on the design and production of a HANDBOOK OF STANDARDS AND RESOURCES FOR SPOKEN LANGUAGE SYSTEMS, with information and recommendations on established practice in the area of spoken language system development in multilingual environments. The scope of the HANDBOOK ranges from system design and the provision of corpora for system development, through corpus classification in terms of lexical information, language models and physical properties, to assessment methodology for speaker verification systems, automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis. Standard reference material from European multilingual speech projects is included. More than two dozen leading scholars in their fields from laboratories in the countries of the European Union have collaborated in producing the HANDBOOK in several authoring and consultation cycles, which has ensured a high level of consensus with respect to the HANDBOOK contents. On one level, the HANDBOOK is addressed to decision makers in industry and funding agencies, with the aim of providing easy access to current practice and requirements in the main spoken language technologies. The HANDBOOK will also be an essential source of information for the laboratory practitioner who requires specific definitions on procedures and formats. Finally, the strong tutorial element in each chapter is addressed towards advanced students in the speech sciences.