---
license: cc-by-sa-4.0
language:
- wo
- ff
- bm
task_categories:
- automatic-speech-recognition
pretty_name: Bocalantics
tags:
- west-african
- wolof
- pulaar
- fula
- bambara
- asr
- speech
- low-resource
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
---

# Bocalantics

One normalized, license-clean speech corpus for **West African languages** —
Wolof, Pulaar/Fula, and Bambara — merged from the fragmented community datasets
into a single source you can train on anywhere with `load_dataset`.

West African languages are spoken by one interconnected, multilingual people;
Bocalantics treats them as one corpus so a single model can learn across them.

## Schema
| field | type |
|---|---|
| `audio` | Audio (16 kHz) |
| `text` | string — the transcription |
| `lang` | string — `wo` / `ff` / `bam` |
| `source` | string — upstream dataset id |
| `license` | string — upstream license |
| `duration` | float — seconds (0.0 where the source omitted it) |

Splits: `train` / `validation` / `test`.

## Composition (clips)
| lang | clips |
|---|---|
| bam | 38769 |
| ff | 17253 |
| wo | 86729 |

## Provenance & attribution
Built only from clean-licensed sources, each row carrying its `source` and
`license`. Please credit the upstream creators:

| source | lang | license | credit | link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| `soynade-research/Wolof-ASR-Data` | wo | CC-BY-SA-4.0 | soynade-research | [link](https://hf.co/datasets/soynade-research/Wolof-ASR-Data) |
| `ngia/ASR_pulaar` | ff | CC-BY-4.0 | ngia | [link](https://hf.co/datasets/ngia/ASR_pulaar) |
| `RobotsMali/bam-asr-early` | bam | CC-BY-4.0 | RobotsMali AI4D Lab (Jeli-ASR, Mali-Pensé / A. Ouattara) | [link](https://hf.co/datasets/RobotsMali/bam-asr-early) |

## License
The collection is released under **CC-BY-SA-4.0** (the share-alike umbrella, since
one source is CC-BY-SA; the CC-BY sources are relicensed into the collection with
attribution preserved). Attribute the upstream creators above.

## Load
```python
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("MOH749/Bocalantics", split="train")
# per-language: ds = ds.filter(lambda x: x["lang"] == "wo")
```

## Roadmap
- v1.1: add **Sereer** + more Wolof/Pulaar via Kallaama (CC-BY-4.0, Jokalante),
  once re-hosted from `github.com/gauthelo/kallaama-speech-dataset`.
- Mande siblings (Soninke, Mandinka) await licensed speech data.