Open corpus, CC BY 4.0

Kenya's languages,
in one open dataset

Words, phrases and recordings from across the country, gathered in one place and licensed so that anyone building software can use them.

36 Kenyan languages are here so far. Pick yours and we will show you exactly what it has, what it is missing, and the fastest way to help.

Where it stands today

4,712
Words checked by a person
36
Languages, 0 with a voice
1,199
Still need a definition
358
Still need a speaker

The last two numbers are the ones nobody publishes. We do, because a corpus that only shows its good figures is not one you should build on. How we decide what counts.

What this is

An open corpus of Kenyan languages. Words, phrases, usage and recordings, contributed by speakers and checked by reviewers with standing in that language.

It is not a museum piece. The goal is machine-readable language data good enough to build on, so that translation, speech recognition and the devices that use them work in Kipsigis and Dholuo and Rendille, not only in English.

Everything here is licensed CC BY 4.0, so anyone can build with it as long as they credit the people it came from.

Look something up

Search across every language at once, in English, Kiswahili, or the language itself.

Or move a word between two Kenyan languages.

These need the most work

Ranked by how much of the core vocabulary is still missing. If you speak one of these, an hour of your time goes further here than anywhere else on the site.

If your language is not in a system, neither are you

Every word added and every voice recorded is one more piece of evidence that these languages can be worked with. That is what makes them worth supporting in the tools people actually use.