---
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