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Release Date: 9/17/2026
Format: MP3
Size: 242.78 MB
A collection of read speech recordings in Basaa (Basaa).
Restrictions/Special Constraints
None provided.
Forbidden Usage
It is forbidden to attempt to determine the identity of speakers in the Common Voice datasets. It is forbidden to re-host or re-share this dataset.
Intended Use
This dataset is intended to be used for training and evaluating automatic speech recognition (ASR) models. It may also be used for applications relating to computer-aided language learning (CALL) and language or heritage revitalisation.
bas)This datasheet is for cv-corpus-27.0-2026-09-11 of the Mozilla Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset for Basaa [Basaa - bas]. The dataset contains 12496 clips representing 13.56 hours of recorded speech (12.09 hours validated) from 57 speakers, recorded from a text corpus of 5,331 sentences.
Basaa is a narrow Bantu language spoken across a geographical area spanning three administrative regions in Cameroon: the Centre, Littoral and South regions. It is estimated that there are currently around 600,000–700,000 speakers. This figure includes different varieties, as well as diasporic populations who identify as Basaa speakers.
The vitality of the Basaa language is stable (Ethnologue online). However, intergenerational transmission of Basaa is increasingly threatened among parents aged 50 and under, particularly in urban areas.
Although Basaa is taught in schools, this does not significantly impact the vitality of the language, mainly due to the current pedagogical approach, which relies on rule-based and descriptivist teaching methods.
The glossonym 'Basaa' is a generic term that encompasses a range of varieties, the speakers of which may identify with the 'Basaa' label to varying degrees, depending on a complex set of geographical, social, political, situational and pragmatic factors. Whether a language variant is considered Basaa depends greatly on the perspective of the person 'telling the story'. Some of the most commonly acknowledged varieties of Basaa include:
Other varieties, such as Ndonga, Mbaa (also known as Mbay-Bati) and Hijuk, may also be classified as Basaa. However, as previously mentioned, not everyone agrees on this classification.
| Code | Accent | Clips | Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| - | 5 (0.0%) | 1 (1.8%) |
The dataset includes the following self-declared age and gender distributions. A coverage summary is shown below each table.
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.
| Code | Gender | Clips | Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| male_masculine | Male, masculine | 15 (0.1%) | 1 (1.8%) |
| female_feminine | Female, feminine | 55 (0.4%) | 5 (8.8%) |
| transgender | Transgender | - | - |
| non-binary | Non-binary | - | - |
| do_not_wish_to_say | Prefer not to say | - | - |
| - | Unspecified | 12,426 (99.4%) | 52 (91.2%) |
Gender declared: 70 of 12,496 clips (0.6%), 5 of 57 speakers (8.8%)
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.
| Code | Age | Clips | Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| teens | Teens | 15 (0.1%) | 1 (1.8%) |
| twenties | Twenties | 20 (0.2%) | 2 (3.5%) |
| thirties | Thirties | 15 (0.1%) | 2 (3.5%) |
| fourties | Fourties | 7,621 (61.0%) | 3 (5.3%) |
| fifties | Fifties | - | - |
| sixties | Sixties | - | - |
| seventies | Seventies | - | - |
| eighties | Eighties | - | - |
| nineties | Nineties | - | - |
| - | Unspecified | 4,825 (38.6%) | 52 (91.2%) |
Age declared: 7,671 of 12,496 clips (61.4%), 5 of 57 speakers (8.8%)
Clip buckets
| Bucket | Clips |
|---|---|
| Validated | 11,139 (89.1%) |
| Invalidated | 1,214 (9.7%) |
| Other | 143 (1.1%) |
Training splits
| Split | Clips |
|---|---|
| Train | 2,112 (19.0%) |
| Dev | 1,324 (11.9%) |
| Test | 1,551 (13.9%) |
Training split coverage: 4,987 of 11,139 validated clips (44.8%)
The dataset contains 11139 validated, 1214 invalidated, and 143 unresolved clips. The average clip duration is 3.909 seconds.
Validated sentences: 5,226
| Category | Count |
|---|---|
| Unvalidated sentences | 105 |
| Pending sentences | 94 |
| Rejected sentences | 11 |
| Reported sentences | 8 |
The corpus contains 5,331 sentences: 5,226 validated and 105 unvalidated (94 pending review, 11 rejected), with 8 reported for review.
Basaa has several competing writing norms. The most widely used are the Catholic missionary orthography, the Prostestant missionary orthography, and a version of the General Alphabet of Cameroonian Languages that was adapted to Basaa.
This dataset is mostly based on the Protestant missionary's orthography, with minor alterations concerning, for example, the signaling of b as implosive [ɓ]. For example, m'bôñ "cassava" vs mbôñ "poison". Other alterations includes the signaling of the n- prefix followed by the y symbol, to distinguish it from the complex symbol ny. For example, nyo "mouth" vs a n'yo "he stole palm wine from the palm trunk".
There follows a randomly selected sample of five sentences from the corpus.
| Source | Sentences |
|---|---|
| sentence-collector | 5,015 (96.0%) |
| From Prof. Njock's dictionary, permission gained by Dr. Emmanuel Ngue Um | 166 (3.2%) |
| Other | 45 (0.9%) |
| Code | Domain | Clips | Speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| general | General | 8 (0.1%) | 4 (7.0%) |
| agriculture_food | Agriculture and Food | - | - |
| automotive_transport | Automotive and Transport | - | - |
| finance | Finance | - | - |
| service_retail | Service and Retail | - | - |
| healthcare | Healthcare | - | - |
| history_law_government | History, Law and Government | - | - |
| media_entertainment | Media and Entertainment | - | - |
| nature_environment | Nature and Environment | - | - |
| news_current_affairs | News and Current Affairs | - | - |
| technology_robotics | Technology and Robotics | - | - |
| language_fundamentals | Language Fundamentals | - | - |
Each row of a tsv file represents a single audio clip, and contains the following information:
client_id - hashed UUID of a given userpath - relative path of the audio filesentence - the sentence to be read aloudsentence_id - unique identifier for the sentencesentence_domain - domain classification(s) of the sentenceup_votes - number of people who said audio matches the textdown_votes - number of people who said audio does not match textage - age of the speaker1gender - gender of the speaker1accents - accents of the speaker1variant - variant of the language1locale - locale code of the languagesegment - if sentence belongs to a custom dataset segment, it will be listed herevalidated_sentences.tsvThe validated_sentences.tsv file contains one row per validated sentence in the text corpus:
sentence_id - unique identifier for the sentencesentence - the sentence textvariant - the variant of the languagesentence_domain - the domain(s) the sentence belongs tosource - the source the sentence was collected fromis_used - whether the sentence is still in circulation for recordingclips_count - number of clips recorded for this sentenceunvalidated_sentences.tsvThe unvalidated_sentences.tsv file contains one row per unvalidated sentence in the text corpus:
sentence_id - unique identifier for the sentencesentence - the sentence textvariant - the variant of the languagesentence_domain - the domain(s) the sentence belongs tosource - the source the sentence was collected fromup_votes - number of upvotes the sentence receiveddown_votes - number of downvotes the sentence receivedstatus - current status of the sentence (pending or rejected)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.
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