INEL Enets Speech Corpus

INEL Enets Speech Corpus

Overview

This dataset is a machine-learning-ready subset of the INEL Enets Corpus (Version 1.1), processed specifically for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) / Speech-to-Text (STT) training under the Mozilla Data Collective initiative. It translates the highly detailed EXMARaLDA XML annotations into the standard tabular layout utilized by Mozilla Common Voice.

About the Enets People and Language

Enets belongs to the Samoyedic group of the Uralic language family and is spoken in the western part of the Taymyr Peninsula in Central Siberia. There are two distinct Enets lects: Tundra Enets (ISO 639-3: `enh`) and Forest Enets (ISO 639-3: `enf`), both of which are represented in this corpus (with Forest Enets making up the majority of the data).

Both lects are critically endangered. The intergenerational transfer of the language has been broken, and full command of Enets is kept by a maximum of only 25-30 people overall, all of whom belong to the elder generation.

Statistics

• Language: Enets (`enf` / `enh`)

• Total Speakers: 23

• Total Audio Clips: 3755 sentences

• Total Audio Duration: 03:41:47 (HH:MM:SS)

• Audio Format: MP3

Data Format

The dataset provides audio clips aligned at the sentence level alongside a `train.tsv` metadata file.

The `train.tsv` contains the following Common Voice conforming fields:

• `client_id`: Unique speaker abbreviation.

• `path`: The filename of the corresponding audio clip.

• `sentence`: The primary transcribed text of the audio.

• `age`: The calculated age of the speaker at the time of recording.

• `gender`: `male` or `female`.

• `accents`: Specific dialect information (e.g., Forest Enets or Tundra Enets).

• `locale`: Locale code (extracted dynamically per speaker; e.g., `enf` or `enh`).

Understanding the Text Columns

The original corpus contains multiple transcription tiers. To ensure every audio clip has a primary transcription for STT training, the `sentence` column is dynamically populated using a strict fallback hierarchy:

1. `st`: Source transcription (Cyrillic orthography).

2. `stl`: Source transcription (Latin script).

3. `ts`: Phonological transcription (IPA-like characters).

Because the `sentence` field can contain Cyrillic, Latin, or Phonological text depending on the original file's availability, the raw `st`, `stl`, and `ts` columns are also preserved in the TSV. To programmatically determine which alphabet/tier was used for the `sentence` column on any given row, consumers can simply test for equality: `sentence == st`, `sentence == stl`, or `sentence == ts`.

Note: To maintain a streamlined, single-task focus on Speech-to-Text modeling, extensive linguistic annotations such as morphological glossing and secondary translations (English, German, Russian) have been excluded from this specific audio dataset.

Dataset Alphabet

The following represents all unique characters encountered in the `sentence` column of this dataset. They are sorted by uppercase, then lowercase, and finally all other symbols:

Ç Ŋ Ɛ А Б В Г Д Е Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Х Ч Ш Щ Ъ Э Я Ҫ Ӈ Ԑ a e f h i k n o t u x z ç ô ŋ ȯ ɔ ɛ ʲ ˀ ε а б в г д е ж з и й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я ё ҫ ӈ ӡ ӣ ԑ ! " ' ( ) , - . / 0 2 6 8 9 : ? ] | « » ʔ ʺ ́ ̄ – — ’ “ ” …

Copyright, License & Required Citation

Created within the long-term INEL project ("Grammatical Descriptions, Corpora and Language Technology for Indigenous Northern Eurasian Languages").

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Required Citation: If you use this dataset in your research, training runs, or derivative works, please cite the source corpus as follows:

Shluinsky, Andrey; Khanina, Olesya; Wagner-Nagy, Beáta. 2025. INEL Enets Corpus. Version 1.1. Publication date 2025-12-31. https://hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0008-005C-1. Archived at Universität Hamburg. In: The INEL corpora of indigenous Northern Eurasian languages. https://hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0007-F45A-1