metadata

language:
  - zul
  - sot
  - xho
  - nde
  - nbl
  - tso
  - tsn
  - nso
  - ssw
  - ven
license: apache-2.0
annotations_creators:
  - no-annotation
language_creators:
  - found
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
source_datasets:
  - original
task_categories:
  - text-generation
task_ids:
  - language-modeling
pretty_name: South African Languages Dataset
tags:
  - south-african-languages
  - african-languages
  - indigenous-languages
datasets:
  - HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2

South African Languages Dataset

Dataset Overview

Language	Training Documents	Training GPT2 Tokens	Avg Tokens/Doc	Max Tokens	Test Documents	Test GPT2 Tokens	Test Avg Tokens/Doc	Test Max Tokens
isiZulu	116,693	192,622,799	1,650.68	335,530	687	1,080,961	1,573.45	15,691
Sesotho	83,329	144,337,938	1,732.15	98,542	841	1,393,086	1,656.46	14,071
isiXhosa	99,567	141,484,241	1,421.00	113,710	788	1,161,296	1,473.73	17,220
isiNdebele	21,922	17,533,799	799.83	42,701	222	170,111	766.27	6,615
Xitsonga	5,591	12,561,979	2,246.82	57,826	58	114,059	1,966.53	8,142
Setswana	5,530	10,405,062	1,881.57	154,365	56	99,303	1,773.27	6,422
Sepedi	5,180	9,947,520	1,920.37	25,017	45	98,001	2,177.80	8,602
siSwati	1,668	3,148,007	1,887.29	24,129	17	29,753	1,750.18	6,682
Tshivenda	3,994	25,756,055	6,448.69	243,593	35	60,390	1,725.43	8,272

This dataset covers 9 of South Africa's 11 official languages (excluding English and Afrikaans)

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

Each instance contains:

text: string feature containing the document text
language: string feature indicating the language name

Data Fields

text: The text content of the document
language: The language of the text (one of: isiZulu, Sesotho, isiXhosa, isiNdebele, Xitsonga, Setswana, Sepedi, siSwati, Tshivenda)

Data Splits

The dataset is divided into training and test splits as shown in the table above.

Data Source

This dataset was collected from the FineWeb-2 dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2

Additional Information

License: Apache 2.0
Version: 1.0.0
Collection Date: January 2025