Common Voice Scripted Speech 23.0 - Zacatlán-Ahuacatlán-Tepetzintla Nahuatl

Maseualtlahtol — Western Sierra Puebla Nahuatl (nhi)

This datasheet is for version 23.0 of the the Mozilla Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset for Western Sierra Puebla Nahuatl (nhi). The dataset contains 0.6 hours of recorded speech (0.1 hours validated) from 6 speakers.

Language

Western Sierra Puebla Nahuatl, alternatively Zacatlán-Ahuacatlán-Tepetzintla Nahuatl, is a variety of Nahuatl spoken in the Northwestern region of Puebla's Sierra Norte. A 2009 report from Mexico's National Institute of Indigenous Languages estimates approximately 17,000 speakers.

The language code is nhi. There is quite a bit of variation within the nhi variant, varying between municipalities and communities. For example, some towns, near San Miguel Tenango, use "inverted prefixes" compared to the rest of the Nahuatl-speaking area, (e.g. in-nihnimi instead of ni-nihnimi, "I walk"). The sentences in this corpus come from the nhi Universal Dependencies treebank, which is made up of samples from all three municipalities, and a set of dictionary-style example sentences written by a speaker from the Tepetzintla municipality.

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 average length of validated sentences is 5.5 words (34 characters). The corpus contains numerous Spanish loanwords, calques, and code-switching. For example, the following sentence from the corpus contains the Spanish conjunction pero "but", Spanish preposition de "of", the subordinator hasta "until", a morphologically-adapted loanword oniquestudiaro (from estudiar "to study"), and a morphologically-adapted number, ocho "eight" (tiochoque "we are eight"). Due to long-standing language contact and bilingualism, Nahuatl commonly incorporates elements of Spanish, and this is well-represented in the text corpus.

Pero de nochten tlen tiochoque sa ye neh oniquestudiaro hasta cuando onipiyaya dieciocho años.

"But of all of us eight I was the only one who studied until when I was eighteen years old."

Writing system

Western Sierra Puebla Nahuatl is written in the Latin script. Specifically, the Common Voice corpus uses an orthographic norm defined by the Summer Institute of Linguistics in collaboration with the nhi-speaking community in San Miguel Tenango, Zacatlán, Puebla. See this Description of the nhi alphabet for more information.

In most cases, Spanish loans, even those with Nahuatl morphology, are written in standard Spanish orthography (the Nahuatl morphemes follow the Nahuatl orthography described here, though it is worth noting the similarities between the writing systems so that there are only rare cases where the orthography change is noticeable).

Symbol table

a b c ch cu d e f g h i j k l m n ñ o p qu r s t tl tz u v w x y

Note that of the alphabet listed above, b d f g j k ñ r v w are used for loanwords and some proper names only.

Sample

There follows a randomly selected sample of five sentences from the corpus.

Uan quitzahtzilihtoc nirana mach canih cah.
Pero neh amo onimatiya tleno nicchiuas mox nimocauas o niyas.
Pero bueno, sa amo tlen sequichiua.
Iuah tiyas n Luis o aquin oc se?
Cualtzin uelic atzintlin

Automatic random samples

Isqui aquin yoquinpaleuito.
Uan niquihlnamiqui a veses oquiyouiya.
Ich n quince tlamis niluitl.
Tlen milauac ne yonimomohteh
Nin se libro itoca mach "rana, can ticah?" quimotlahtlania se telpucatl.

Sources

• Subset of UD corpus (Public domain)

• Individual sentences submitted by users through the Mozilla Common Voice interface (Public domain)

Text domains

• General

Processing

The original sentences from the UD treebank are written in varying orthographic norms. Prior to their inclusion into the Common Voice corpus, the orthgoraphy was converted to the SIL San Miguel Tenango orthography ("ilv") using a rule-based automatic converter from the py-elotl Python package, followed by some manual verification.

Community links

• Common Voice translators on Pontoon

• Original language request on GitHub

Contribute

• Contribute voice recordings

• Contribute sentences

• Validate recordings

• Review sentences

Datasheet authors

• Robert A. Pugh robertp@mozillafoundation.org

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.