Common Voice Scripted Speech 25.0 - Bafut

bfd — Bafut (bfd)

This datasheet is for cv-corpus-25.0-2026-03-09 of the Mozilla Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset for Bafut [bfd - bfd]. The dataset contains 7178 clips representing 11.18 hours of recorded speech (10.05 hours validated) from 36 speakers, recorded from a text corpus of 766 sentences.

Language

Bafut is a Grassfield-Bantu language that belongs to the Ring group, alongside Pinyin, Mankon, Nkwen, Awing, Bambili, Menchum, Babanki, Veŋo, Bamunka, and Wushi. It is spoken in the Mezam and Menchum divisions of the Northwest Region of Cameroon.

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: 92 of 7,178 clips (1.3%), 2 of 36 speakers (5.6%)

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: 93 of 7,178 clips (1.3%), 3 of 36 speakers (8.3%)

Data splits for modelling

Clip buckets

Training splits

Training split coverage: 766 of 6,454 validated clips (11.9%)

The dataset contains 6454 validated, 51 invalidated, and 673 unresolved clips. The average clip duration is 5.609 seconds.

Text corpus

Validated sentences: 766

The corpus contains 766 sentences: 766 validated and 0 unvalidated (0 pending review, 0 rejected), with 0 reported for review.

Writing system

The collection of sentence prompts provided by the language representatives aligns with the General Alphabet of Cameroonian Languages

Sample

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

1. Tswentə mɨlùʼù mya mfa ndɔŋ ya ta mə̀ ghɛɛ.

2. A tɔŋ nɨbàŋə̀.

3. Mə kɨ sɨ taŋtə ma mùu ajàŋ njɨŋkə aa jɨ̀ŋkə aa ɛ?

4. Bìꞌinə̀ yə mə taa aɨ lɛ ntswe nɨ àtàŋəntɨɨ aà.

5. Mughurə mɨ mmɛ a ndâ, kaa tsiʼì àbâ.

Sources

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

• text - supposed transcription of the audio

• 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

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

• prompt_upvotes - number of upvotes the sentence prompt received

• prompt_reports - number of reports the sentence prompt received

• is_edited - whether the clip's transcription has been edited

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

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/bfd

• Speak

• Write

• Listen

• Review

Acknowledgements

Datasheet authors

Emmanuel Ngue Um , Ambe Melvis Lemanka , Ellis Taku Angwa , John Che Ambe

Citation guidelines

Ngué Um E, Ngo Tjomb EEC, Dibengue FL, Banum Manguele BM, Abo Djoulde B, Nyambe MA, Atangana Eloundou BM, Ngami Kamagoua JS, Mpouda Avom J, Nyobe Z, Eloundou Eyenga EG, Likwai AP (2025) Speech Technologies Datasets for African Under-Served Languages. Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, edited by Lachler J, Agyapong G, Arppe A, Moeller S, Chaudhary A, Rijhwani S, Rosenblum D. URL Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

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.

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