Common Voice Scripted Speech 24.0 - Brahui

[Brahui] — Brahui (brh)

This datasheet is for version 24.0 of the the Mozilla Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset for Brahui (brh). The dataset contains 5108 clips representing 10.32 hours of recorded speech (10.27 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.

Demographic information

The dataset includes the following distribution of age and gender.

Gender

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

Age

Self-declared age information, percentage 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 four 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؟

Automatic random samples

دیوان اٹ تینا جہد ءِ برجا تخا تینا گڈیکو ساہ اسکان ہندا ادبی تنظیم نا
ڈن چوک ……ڈن چوک……ڈن چوک نا قومی ترانہ غان تینا برانز نا بناءِ کے تو……
براہوئی ادب کن بھاز کرے
پاننگ نا ہیت آک پد سلیسر
ٹی اف تو نن اینو نا تینا ”بوگ شو“ اٹ پنی آ بوگ شو انا

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

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.

Get involved!

Community links

• Common Voice translators on Pontoon

Contribute

• Contribute sentences

Acknowledgements

Datasheet authors

• Dr. Zia ur Rehman zia.rehman@aiou.edu.pk

• Muhammad Imran muhammad.imran@numl.edu.pk

Funding

This dataset was partially funded by the Open Multilingual Speech Fund managed by Mozilla Common Voice.

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.