Afaan Oromoo-TTS-Dataset

Language

Afaan Oromo (ISO 639-3: orm) is a Cushitic language of the Afroasiatic family and the most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, with an estimated 40 to 50 million speakers worldwide. It is the official working language of the Oromia Regional State and one of the five federal working languages of Ethiopia. Afaan Oromo belongs to the Eastern Cushitic branch and is typologically characterised by agglutinative morphology, verb-final word order (SOV), and a system of grammatical gender (masculine and feminine). The language exhibits phonemic vowel length distinctions, a glottal stop phoneme, and a pitch-accent system.

Variants

The recordings in this dataset were produced by a single speaker of Afaan Oromo from Ethiopia. The variety recorded is representative of the standard written and broadcast norm of Afaan Oromo as used in Oromia, which underpins the Qubee orthographic standard. No sub-variety distinctions are encoded in the dataset.

Alphabet

The orthography used in the transcription of the audio recordings follows the Qubee alphabet, the standardised Latin-based writing system officially adopted for Afaan Oromo in 1991 by the Oromia regional government. Qubee replaced the Ethiopic (Ge'ez) script, which had been used for Oromo in some contexts, and is now the universally used writing system for the language in Ethiopia and across the Oromo diaspora.

Qubee is built on the Latin alphabet and augmented with a small number of conventions to represent sounds specific to Afaan Oromo. Vowel length, which is phonemically contrastive in the language, is indicated by doubling the vowel letter (e.g., a vs. aa, e vs. ee, i vs. ii, o vs. oo, u vs. uu). The glottal stop, a phonemically distinctive consonant in Afaan Oromo, is represented by an apostrophe or right single quotation mark (ʼ or '). The digraph dh represents the implosive bilabial-alveolar stop, and ph represents a bilabial fricative. The result is an orthographic system that is accessible to Oromo literacy learners while remaining phonologically faithful to the spoken language, making the transcriptions in this dataset accurate representations of the Afaan Oromo heard in the recordings.

Source

This dataset was compiled as part of a Text-to-Speech data collection initiative for Afaan Oromo. The textual source material consists of news reports and biographical narratives in Afaan Oromo, drawn from publicly available Afaan Oromo media. The speaker read prepared passages drawn from these texts, providing naturalistic and culturally grounded speech data. Recordings were made across 19 sessions and subsequently curated, deduplicated, and aligned with their corresponding transcriptions.

Domain

The dataset consists of prompted read speech in Afaan Oromo. The textual source material derives from contemporary news reports and biographical narratives — a register that is representative of standard written and broadcast Afaan Oromo. The recordings offer good prosodic and lexical diversity — including varied sentence lengths, clause structures, and registers — making them suitable for TTS model training and ASR evaluation.

Size

Total size of MP3 audio: approx. 184 MB Total size of TSV mapping files: approx. 268 KB

Structure

This dataset comprises audio clips and audio/text mapping files organised across 19 recording sessions. There are 1,127 audio clips in MP3 format, totalling 3 hours, 20 minutes and 47 seconds of speech. The dataset includes 19 audio/text mapping files (mapping.tsv), each containing aligned audio/sentence pairs for the corresponding session, with 1,127 aligned pairs in total. Each TSV file contains the following fields: audio_filename, key, sentence, attempts.

Sample