Sub-Saharan Africa · Latin / Ajami
Hausa Code-Switching Speech Dataset
Hausa code-switching speech sourced to your specification — no inventory, no fixed listing. This page covers what is specifically hard about this pairing, and which fields your specification needs to pin down.
Why code-switching speech in Hausa is its own problem
Hausa code-switching has two layers that must not be confused. Arabic religious expressions and a large Arabic loan vocabulary are fully nativized and are simply Hausa; English switching is live and productive, concentrated in technology, education, and business. English words taken into Hausa also receive tone and vowel length of their own, and different speakers assign them differently, which the annotation has to record as spoken.
The field to pin down first: Fix the nativized-loanword list before annotation begins (Arabic religious phrases in, not counted as switches), and annotate the tone and length actually assigned to English words rather than a dictionary form.
At a glance
| Language | Hausa |
|---|---|
| Primary region | Sub-Saharan Africa |
| Writing system | Latin / Ajami |
| Category | Code-Switching Speech |
| Specification field to settle first | Fix the nativized-loanword list before annotation begins (Arabic religious phrases in, not counted as switches), and annotate the tone and length actually assigned to English words rather than a dictionary form. |
| Delivery | Sourced to order, pilot batch before the full run |
What code-switching speech data is
Speech that mixes two or more languages inside a single utterance — Hinglish, Spanglish, Taglish — used for recognition in real spoken settings.
What buyers get wrong about it
The switch point is the hard part — where language A gives way to B inside a sentence, different annotators can place it several words apart. The guideline has to be fixed before annotation starts.
The specification field that decides the quote
Whether annotation marks word-level switch points or only tags the language of the whole utterance — the workload differs by a multiple.
The language side: what Hausa demands
Hausa is written in two scripts at once: Latin (Boko) dominates, while Arabic script (Ajami) is used in religious contexts. Running both in parallel means the script-to-speech mapping has to be defined separately for each.
What we can put in this delivery
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Read and conversational speech
Scripted recording for TTS, and unscripted conversation for recognition. Specified separately because they need different speaker pools.
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Transcription to your convention
Orthographic or phonetic, with the guideline written before production and shared with you for review.
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Speaker metadata
Age band, gender, region and dialect background per file, so you can slice the dataset rather than take it whole.
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Consent documentation
Signed speaker consent covering the intended use, plus collection methodology and the annotation guideline.
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Pilot batch
A small batch first, which you can reject. Misalignments surface after a few hours rather than at delivery.
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Delivery in your format
Audio format, sampling rate, segmentation length and metadata schema set to your pipeline's requirements.
What arrives in a delivery
| Component | What it is |
|---|---|
| Audio files | Format, sampling rate and segmentation length set to your pipeline. Named to a convention you specify. |
| Transcription | Orthographic or phonetic, produced under a guideline you review before production starts. |
| Speaker metadata | Age band, gender, region and dialect background per file, plus a speaker identifier so the dataset can be sliced. |
| Recording conditions | Environment, device and, where relevant, measured signal-to-noise ratio per file. |
| Annotation guideline | The document the annotators worked from, so you can reproduce the conventions on your own data. |
| Consent records | Signed speaker consent covering your intended use, with the transfer mechanism addressed where required. |
| Collection methodology | How speakers were recruited, screened and scheduled — the part that tells you how biased the pool is. |
| Quality report | Pilot outcome, re-work log, and the annotator agreement figures where the task supports measuring them. |
Questions we get about Hausa Code-Switching Speech
How many distinct speakers can you provide for Hausa Code-Switching Speech?
It depends on the specification and the timeline, and we will give a real number rather than a target. For this pairing, speaker recruitment is usually the step that sets the schedule. Fix the nativized-loanword list before annotation begins (Arabic religious phrases in, not counted as switches), and annotate the tone and length actually assigned to English words rather than a dictionary form.
Can you annotate to our own guideline instead of the default?
Yes, and for this pairing we would recommend it. Hausa code-switching has two layers that must not be confused. That is exactly the kind of decision a default guideline leaves open, and it is where annotators diverge. Send us your guideline, or we will draft one and you can review it before production starts.
Do you offer a sample before we commit to a full run?
Yes. Select a free sample in the request form and describe what you need. A pilot batch is the cheapest way to establish whether the quality bar is reachable for Hausa Code-Switching Speech before committing to the full volume.
Is the data licensed or owned outright?
Licensing terms are set per project, so tell us how the model will be used and whether it will be distributed. Consent documentation travels with the data either way, and we do not handle medical or clinical data or recorded telephone calls.
Other datasets in Hausa
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Hausa Speech Translation
Parallel data pairing source-language audio with target-language translation, used for speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation models.
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Hausa In-the-Wild Speech
Speech collected under fully natural conditions — no studio, no topic constraints — as close to real usage as collection gets.
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Hausa Call Center Speech
Recorded customer-service calls, real or simulated, capturing both the agent and the caller side, used for call center QC, intent recognition, and dialogue systems.
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Hausa Conversational Speech
Speech from natural conversation between two or more people, on open or semi-structured topics, used for conversational AI, voice assistants, and small talk models.
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Hausa Singing Voice
Vocal recordings with melody, in both a cappella and accompanied form, used for singing voice synthesis, music information retrieval, and lyric alignment.
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Hausa Speech Commands
Targeted recordings of short command words or phrases, usually with many speakers reading each entry several times over, used for wake words and on-device command recognition.
Code-Switching Speech in other languages
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Arabic (Egyptian) Code-Switching Speech
Middle East & North Africa
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Arabic (Gulf) Code-Switching Speech
Middle East & North Africa
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Kannada Code-Switching Speech
South Asia
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Punjabi Code-Switching Speech
South Asia
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Burmese Code-Switching Speech
Southeast Asia
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Amharic Code-Switching Speech
Sub-Saharan Africa
Request Hausa Code-Switching Speech
Tell us the language, the hours, and what the data needs to look like. You will get a real number and a real timeline — not a range. If we cannot source it well, we will tell you that instead.
- Pilot batch before the full run, so problems surface early.
- Consent documentation delivered with the data.
- No medical or clinical data. No recorded telephone calls.