spaCy/website/docs/usage/101/_language-data.md

Every language is different – and usually full of exceptions and special cases, especially amongst the most common words. Some of these exceptions are shared across languages, while others are entirely specific – usually so specific that they need to be hard-coded. The lang module contains all language-specific data, organized in simple Python files. This makes the data easy to update and extend.

The shared language data in the directory root includes rules that can be generalized across languages – for example, rules for basic punctuation, emoji, emoticons, single-letter abbreviations and norms for equivalent tokens with different spellings, like " and ”. This helps the models make more accurate predictions. The individual language data in a submodule contains rules that are only relevant to a particular language. It also takes care of putting together all components and creating the Language subclass – for example, English or German.

from spacy.lang.en import English
from spacy.lang.de import German

nlp_en = English()  # Includes English data
nlp_de = German()  # Includes German data

Name	Description
Stop words stop_words.py	List of most common words of a language that are often useful to filter out, for example "and" or "I". Matching tokens will return True for is_stop.
Tokenizer exceptions tokenizer_exceptions.py	Special-case rules for the tokenizer, for example, contractions like "can't" and abbreviations with punctuation, like "U.K.".
Norm exceptions norm_exceptions.py	Special-case rules for normalizing tokens to improve the model's predictions, for example on American vs. British spelling.
Punctuation rules punctuation.py	Regular expressions for splitting tokens, e.g. on punctuation or special characters like emoji. Includes rules for prefixes, suffixes and infixes.
Character classes char_classes.py	Character classes to be used in regular expressions, for example, latin characters, quotes, hyphens or icons.
Lexical attributes lex_attrs.py	Custom functions for setting lexical attributes on tokens, e.g. like_num, which includes language-specific words like "ten" or "hundred".
Syntax iterators syntax_iterators.py	Functions that compute views of a Doc object based on its syntax. At the moment, only used for noun chunks.
Lemmatizer lemmatizer.py	Lemmatization rules or a lookup-based lemmatization table to assign base forms, for example "be" for "was".
Tag map tag_map.py	Dictionary mapping strings in your tag set to Universal Dependencies tags.
Morph rules morph_rules.py	Exception rules for morphological analysis of irregular words like personal pronouns.