Common Voice Scripted Speech 26.0 - Adyghe

Адыгабзэ — Adyghe (ady)

This datasheet is for cv-corpus-26.0-2026-06-12 of the Mozilla Common Voice Scripted Speech dataset for Adyghe [Адыгабзэ - ady]. The dataset contains 63508 clips representing 94.26 hours of recorded speech (78.67 hours validated) from 168 speakers, recorded from a text corpus of 14,258 sentences.

Language

Adyghe (/ˈædɪɡeɪ/ or /ˌɑːdɪˈɡeɪ/, also known as West Circassian) is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken by the western subgroups of Adygheans (Circassians). Identified by the ISO 639-3 code ady, it belongs to the Northwest Caucasian language family. Adyghe is also one of the official languages of the Republic of Adygea, a federal subject of the Russian Federation.

The Adyghean (West Circassians) population is estimated to be between 1,200,000 to 2,000,000 although the number of active speakers is significantly lower. Adygheans are primarily located in the Republic of Adygea, Russia, with additional diaspora populations in Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Syria, the United States, Canada, and various European countries due to historical migrations. However, only about 10% of the Adyghe population is considered literate in the language.

For more information about the global distribution of Adyghe population, see:
The Adyghe (Circassian) Diaspora Today.

Variants

The following table presents the general language variants of the Adyghe language used in the Common Voice project.

Questions in the MCV-SS project are provided in Cyrillic and Turkish transliteration to support non-literate users from the Turkish diaspora. With "literacy" we mean being able to read the Adyghe alphabet.

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: 45,862 of 63,508 clips (72.2%), 58 of 168 speakers (34.5%)

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: 59,377 of 63,508 clips (93.5%), 111 of 168 speakers (66.1%)

Data splits for modelling

Clip buckets

Training splits

Training split coverage: 11,382 of 53,002 validated clips (21.5%)

The dataset contains 53002 validated, 3261 invalidated, and 7245 unresolved clips. The average clip duration is 5.344 seconds.

Text corpus

The text corpus for the Adyghe language in the Common Voice project consists of a diverse collection of sentences contributed by native speakers. These sentences cover a wide range of topics, including everyday conversations, cultural references, and various domains such as literature, news articles, conversational texts, technology, health, and education. The maximum length of Adyghe sentences in this dataset is limited to 15 words and 140 characters due to restrictions in the Common Voice interface. However, Adyghe sentences can naturally be much longer. In this dataset, the average length has been aimed to be maintained at around 6–8 words and 80–100 characters to reflect the typical structure and complexity of the Adyghe language. The corpus has been curated to ensure a broad representation of vocabulary and grammatical constructs, making it suitable for training robust speech recognition models.

Validated sentences: 11,484

The corpus contains 14,258 sentences: 11,484 validated and 2,774 unvalidated (923 pending review, 1,851 rejected), with 1,435 reported for review.

Writing system

The Adyghe language uses the Cyrillic script with some additional letters to represent specific sounds in the language. The alphabet consists of 66 letters, including 33 standard Cyrillic letters and 33 additional letters unique to Adyghe. The writing system is phonetic, meaning that words are generally spelled as they are pronounced. Adyghe is written from left to right.

During the period when there was no Adyghe keyboard option, the recorded text content was written with the Russian keyboard as the closest alternative. The characters in the Adyghe alphabet defined by the Unicode Consortium as "Cyrillic Letter Palocka ('Ӏ': u04C0, utf-8)" and "Cyrillic Letter Small Palocka ('ӏ': u04CF, utf-8)" are not defined in this keyboard model. For this reason, since the early days of computers, when creating digital data in Adyghe or Kabardian, one of the characters "Latin Capital Letter i ('I': u0049, utf-8)", "Latin Small Letter L ('l': u006C, utf-8)" or "Digit One ('1': u0031, utf-8)", albeit rarely "Vertical Line ('|': u007C, utf-8)" was used randomly due to their visual similarities (Nemlioğlu, 2018). This situation emerges as an important factor that negatively affects data quality (Nemlioğlu,2025).

Therefore we allowed the use of only the keyboard layout specially designed for Adyghe language in the Common Voice project. This keyboard layout includes all the letters of the Adyghe alphabet, including the special characters "Cyrillic Letter Palocka ('Ӏ': u04C0, utf-8)" and "Cyrillic Letter Small Palocka ('ӏ': u04CF, utf-8)". The use of this keyboard layout has significantly improved the quality of the text data in Adyghe. Click here to download Adyghe Keyboard for Windows.

Symbol table

Main Alphabet: (Ordered by ascending) а б в г {гу} {гъ} {гъу} д {дж} {дз} {дзу} е ё ж {жъ} {жъу} {жь} з и й к {ку} {къ} {къу} {кӏ} {кӏу} л {лъ} {лӏ} м н о п {пӏ} {пӏу} р с т {тӏ} {тӏу} у ф х {хъ} {хъу} {хь} ц {цу} {цӏ} ч {чъ} {чӏ} ш {шъ} {шъу} {шӏ} {шӏу} щ ъ ы ь э ю я ӏ {ӏу}

Orthographic–Phonetic Table (IPA):

Auxiliary exemplar: The following letters may also be present in the dataset, but are not part of the official Adyghe alphabet. They are used to represent three specific sounds in the Shapsug dialect. They could potentially appear in some dialogues or quoted sentences.

{гь}: Voiced dorso-palatal plosive [ɟ] (e.g. егьэ (jeɟɘ) [Shapsug] = еджэ [Adyghe]: reading) {кь}: Voiceless dorso-palato-velar plosive [kʲ] (e.g. кьэт (kʲɘt) [Shapsug] = чэт [Adyghe]: chicken ) {кӏь}: Glottalized voiceless dorso-palato-velar plosive [kʲʼ] (e.g. кӏьакӏьэ (kʲʼäkʲʼɘ) [Shapsug] = кӏэнкӏэ [Adyghe]: egg)

Other Languages: Some entries in the dataset include words originating from other languages, such as Russian or Turkish. These words have been phonetically transcribed using the Adyghe alphabet, with characters chosen to approximate their original pronunciation as closely as possible.

Sample

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

1. Hem halığur yêşşxı, ıç'e yêğesısı.

2. Ахэр кӏэлэеджакӏох, тикъуаджэ дэт еджапӏэм щеджэх.

3. Цӏыф жъугъэхэм зэранэсырэ каналхэмкӏэ къэдгъэлъэгъощт.

4. Казбэк чъыещт.

5. Ащ доски, тхылъ зыдэлъ шкафи, къэгъэгъаби итых.

Sources

All sentences in this dataset were created specifically for the Common Voice project by native Adyghe speakers. The sentences were carefully crafted to cover a wide range of topics and linguistic structures, ensuring a diverse and representative corpus for speech recognition training.

Text domains

Processing

The text data in this dataset has undergone several processing steps to ensure quality and consistency:

Recommended post-processing

These sentences are provided as-is, and no additional post-processing is required. However, users may choose to perform Unicode normalization (NFC or NFD) depending on their specific use case.

Although the sentences (questions/translation texts) have been written and verified using correct Unicode characters via the ady & kbd keyboard for Windows, it is possible that some text inputs beyond our control may have been submitted due to Common Voice’s open participation model.

After the datasets are published, we re-audit these entries and take the necessary steps to ensure corrections in the next release.

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

• sentence - the sentence to be read aloud

• sentence_id - unique identifier for the sentence

• sentence_domain - domain classification(s) of the sentence

• 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

• locale - locale code of the language

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

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

• If you want to join ady community, start here: https://bit.ly/cv_circassian_start_here

You can find more information about how to participate in the Common Voice Project on the following page:

• Common Voice translators on Pontoon

• Common Voice Communities

Discussions

Comming soon.

• Common Voice on Matrix

• Common Voice on Discourse

• Common Voice on Discord

• Common Voice on Telegram

Contribute

We do not advice to contribute to this dataset directly, because of writting system-keyboard issues. Please, read the section "Writing system" above and the following article: https://www.nemerko.org/the-importance-of-adyghe-keyboard-usage-for-artificial-intelligence-training/

If you want to contribute to the Adyghe language, please visit the following links: https://bit.ly/cv_circassian_start_here

A special thanks to all the volunteers who contributed to this dataset.

• Speak

• Write

• Listen

• Review

Acknowledgements

Datasheet authors

M.Ugur Nemlioglu
Murat Topçu

M.Uğur Nemlioğlu Saida Abregova Elizaveta Gogunokova Murat Topçu

Bülent Özden (Technical Advisor)

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