Common Voice Scripted Speech 26.0 - Western Sierra Puebla Nahuatl

nhi — Western Sierra Puebla Nahuatl (nhi)

This datasheet is for cv-corpus-26.0-2026-06-12 of the Mozilla Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset for Western Sierra Puebla Nahuatl [nhi - nhi]. The dataset contains 427 clips representing 0.6 hours of recorded speech (0.05 hours validated) from 6 speakers, recorded from a text corpus of 769 sentences.

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 self-declared age and gender distributions. A coverage summary is shown below each table.

Gender

Self-declared gender information. The table shows clip and speaker counts with percentages. Speakers who did not declare a gender are listed as Unspecified. A dash (-) indicates zero.

Gender declared: 347 of 427 clips (81.3%), 1 of 6 speakers (16.7%)

Age

Self-declared age information. The table shows clip and speaker counts with percentages. Speakers who did not declare an age are listed as Unspecified. A dash (-) indicates zero.

Age declared: 347 of 427 clips (81.3%), 1 of 6 speakers (16.7%)

Data splits for modelling

Clip buckets

Training splits

Training split coverage: 40 of 40 validated clips (100.0%)

The dataset contains 40 validated, 0 invalidated, and 387 unresolved clips. The average clip duration is 5.081 seconds.

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."

Validated sentences: 758

The corpus contains 769 sentences: 758 validated and 11 unvalidated (11 pending review, 0 rejected), with 0 reported for review.

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.

1. Cualtzin uelic motlacualtzin

2. Quema yotitiquit o amo?

3. Entonces n telpucatl cualani tlen quitlapana n frasco.

4. Yeh yoquimomohteh n bohtimohmol.

5. Tlahcoyan tipemeh panoa ueyatl

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.

Fields

Clips

Each row of a tsv file represents a single audio clip, and contains the following information:

• client_id - hashed UUID of a given user

• path - relative path of the audio file

• sentence - the sentence to be read aloud

• sentence_id - unique identifier for the sentence

• sentence_domain - domain classification(s) of the sentence

• up_votes - number of people who said audio matches the text

• down_votes - number of people who said audio does not match text

• age - age of the speaker1

• gender - gender of the speaker1

• accents - accents of the speaker1

• variant - variant of the language1

• locale - locale code of the language

• segment - if sentence belongs to a custom dataset segment, it will be listed here

validated_sentences.tsv

The validated_sentences.tsv file contains one row per validated sentence in the text corpus:

• sentence_id - unique identifier for the sentence

• sentence - the sentence text

• variant - the variant of the language

• sentence_domain - the domain(s) the sentence belongs to

• source - the source the sentence was collected from

• is_used - whether the sentence is still in circulation for recording

• clips_count - number of clips recorded for this sentence

unvalidated_sentences.tsv

The unvalidated_sentences.tsv file contains one row per unvalidated sentence in the text corpus:

• sentence_id - unique identifier for the sentence

• sentence - the sentence text

• variant - the variant of the language

• sentence_domain - the domain(s) the sentence belongs to

• source - the source the sentence was collected from

• up_votes - number of upvotes the sentence received

• down_votes - number of downvotes the sentence received

• status - current status of the sentence (pending or rejected)

Get involved

Community links

• Common Voice translators on Pontoon

• Common Voice Communities

Discussions

• Common Voice on Matrix

• Common Voice on Discourse

• Common Voice on Discord

• Common Voice on Telegram

Contribute

• Speak

• Write

• Listen

• Review

Acknowledgements

Datasheet authors

• Robert A. Pugh

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.

Footnotes

1. For a full list of age, gender, and accent options, see the demographics spec. These will only be reported if the speaker opted in to provide that information. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4