Common Voice Scripted Speech 25.0 - Khowar

کھوار — Khowar (khw)

This datasheet is for cv-corpus-25.0-2026-03-09 of the Mozilla Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset for Khowar [کھوار - khw]. The dataset contains 9845 clips representing 18.53 hours of recorded speech (16 hours validated) from 50 speakers, recorded from a text corpus of 7,251 sentences.

Language

The Khowar-speaking people are the largest group in Chitral and also use as a lingua franca in in the valley. This language is also known as Qashqari by Pashto speakers. It is classified within the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family. Besides Chitral, Khowar is also spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan and the Swat Valley. The estimated number of Khowar speakers in all regions is more than 600,000, with a population of 400,000 in Chitral alone. Khowar is a literate language, with books, magazines, radio and tive programs, and audio/video documentation. It has been included in the school curriculum since 2017.

Accents

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: 10 of 9,845 clips (0.1%), 0 of 50 speakers (0.0%)

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: 9,154 of 9,845 clips (93.0%), 6 of 50 speakers (12.0%)

Data splits for modelling

Clip buckets

Training splits

Training split coverage: 5,784 of 8,500 validated clips (68.0%)

The dataset contains 8500 validated, 207 invalidated, and 1138 unresolved clips. The average clip duration is 6.777 seconds.

Text corpus

The text come from the books FLI and its partners organisation published. I also wrote my own around 1000 sentences.

Validated sentences: 7,051

The corpus contains 7,251 sentences: 7,051 validated and 200 unvalidated (189 pending review, 11 rejected), with 4 reported for review.

Writing system

I used the standard writing system that is Perso-Arabic with standard symbol for specific sounds of Khowar

Symbol table

In addition to all letters of Urdu we use the following additional letters: ݱ ݰ ݯ ځ څ

Sample

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

1. غلام نبی ہیہ لُوؤ کارکوری اوا کورمہ اسوم اچی پِیسہ سُم لُودوم رے ٹیلی فونو بند اریر

2. شوروئی دی آخر بیتی اشوئے

3. نہ اوغ شیر،نہ بجلی وا نہ راہ صحیح

4. تہ ژور بابا ،بابا، رے ہر کا گیکو قوشد کویان

5. مہ ژور مہ دُوری اسور

Sources

1. Angrestan by Zafar Ullah Pervaz

2. Robinson Cruso, by Fardi

3. Oraya by Farid

4. Translation of MTB MLE material in Khowar by FLI

5. Khowar Material by Farid

6. Human and Children Rights Translation by Farid.

7. Khowar Folktales by Zahoor

8. 100 Sentence by myself

Text domains

General

Processing

Collected soft books and got copy waiver from authors. Put on Excel sheet and reviewed the sentences for length and correction. Sent to Meesum Alam. In my own case upload the sentence directly. Voice over the sentences by different by people. Validated the sentences by different people.

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

• Speak

• Write

• Listen

• Review

Acknowledgements

Datasheet authors

Common Voice Community

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