Common Voice Scripted Speech 23.0 - Brahui

[Brahui] — Brahui (brh)

This datasheet is for version 23.0 of the the Mozilla Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset for Brahui (brh). The dataset contains 11 hours of recorded speech (11 hours validated) from 18 speakers.

Language

Brahui is a dravidian language spoken primarily in Central and western Balochistan, Pakistan, with smaller communities in Afghanistan and Iran. Despite being geographically isolated from other Dravidian languages, Brahui has retained its distinct linguistics identity for centuries. It is spoken by around 2.8 million people and coexists with surrounding languages such as Balochi, Pashtu and Persian, which has influenced its vocabulary and structure. The language is traditionally oral, though it has been written using the Arabic scripts in modern times. Brahui holds historical significances and contributes to the rich linguistic diversity of the region. The language has three main dialects: Sarawani, Jalawani and Rakhshani, with Sarawani being the standard dialect.

Variants

The dataset represents the Sarawani variety of Brahui, which is considered the standard dialect of the language.

Demographic information

The dataset includes the following distribution of age and gender.

Gender

Self-declared gender information, frequency refers to the number of clips annotated with this gender.

Age

Self-declared age information, frequency refers to the number of clips annotated with this age band.

Text corpus

The corpus consists of spontaneous spoken texts in the Sarawani dialect of Brahui. It includes a large number of sentences and utterances, primarily drawn from natural conversations and everyday speech of native speakers. The dataset emphasizes oral and informal registers, reflecting authentic language use rather than standardized or literary forms.

Writing system

Although Brahui is traditionally an oral language, in modern times it has been written using the Perso-Arabic script with modifications to represent specific Brahui sounds.

Symbol table

ا ب پ ت ٹ ث ج چ ح خ د ڈ ذ ر ڑ ز ژ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ک گ ل ڷ م ن ں و ہ ھ ی ے

Sample

There follows a randomly selected sample of five sentences from the corpus. کامن وائس امر کاریم کیک۔ جملہ غاتے مخلوق نا تیز آن توار اٹ خواننگ کن مچ کننگانے بندغاک بریرہ و تینا توار نا کمک ئے کیرہ۔ ای زبان ئس امر ساڑی کیو؟ نن کامن وائس آ سہی ڈول اٹ زبان ئے امر خواننگ کینہ؟

Sources

The corpus originates from a Brahui book. Sentences and short texts were created from the book and then spoken by native speakers for recording. Thus, the primary source is written Brahui material adapted into spoken form.

Text domains

General

Processing

The original Brahui book was segmented into smaller sentences and short texts. These were distributed to native speakers, who recorded themselves reading the material.

Recommended post-processing

Further post-processing may include verifying the alignment between text and audio, checking for transcription errors, and standardizing the text format.

Community links

Currently, there are no dedicated community links for this dataset.

Discussions

There are no public discussion links specifically related to the creation of this dataset. All work was carried out internally during the dataset preparation process.

Contribute

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/brh/write

Datasheet authors

Dr zia ur Rehman ; zia.rehman@aiou.edu.pk Muhammad Imran ; muhammad.imran@numl.edu.pk

Citation guidelines

NIL

Funding

This dataset was funded by Mozilla Pontoon. The project is managed by Meesum Alam, who oversees the funding and coordination.

Licence

This dataset is released under the Creative Commons Zero (CC-0) licence. By downloading this data you agree to not determine the identity of speakers in the dataset.