Datasets:

Orinode
/

naija-customer-call-code-switch

license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
  - text-generation
  - translation
language:
  - en
  - ha
  - yo
  - ig
size_categories:
  - 10K<n<100K
tags:
  - code-switching
  - nigerian
  - customer-service
  - low-resource
  - african-languages
  - hausa
  - yoruba
  - igbo
  - speech
  - asr
pretty_name: Naija Customer-Call Code-Switch Corpus

Naija Customer-Call Code-Switch Corpus (Orinode-CCS)

Hand-written customer-service sentences with natural code-switching between Nigerian English and three indigenous Nigerian languages — Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo. Covers 30+ business sectors typical of real customer-service calls in Nigeria.

Released by Orinode under CC-BY 4.0 to support research on multilingual ASR, NLU, and conversational AI for low-resource African languages.

Why this dataset exists

Global voice-AI systems trip badly on Nigerian speech. Not because Nigerian languages are obscure — Hausa alone has ~80M native speakers — but because public datasets capturing the way Nigerians actually talk, especially the rapid mid-sentence code-switching between English and indigenous languages, are scarce.

This corpus targets that gap: 15,000 hand-written, naturalistic customer-service sentences a Nigerian would plausibly say to a call-center, broken down by language pair and code-switch ratio.

Languages & sizes

Pair	Code	Lines	Format
Hausa ↔ English	`ha-en`	5,000	One sentence per line
Igbo ↔ English	`ig-en`	5,000	One sentence per line
Yoruba ↔ English	`yo-en`	5,000	One sentence per line
Total		15,000

Yoruba sentences use full diacritics (ọ̀ ọ́ ẹ̀ ẹ́ ṣ etc.). Igbo sentences use standard orthography (ọ ụ ị ṅ). Hausa sentences use Latin orthography.

Structure (9-section template per file)

Each file follows the same 9-section template so subsets can be cleanly extracted:

Lines	Section	Style
1–500	Gold seed	Natural mixed code-switch, balanced
501–1000	Target-leaning	~70% indigenous language, ~30% English
1001–2000	Balanced	50/50 split
2001–3000	English-leaning	~70% English, ~30% indigenous
3001–4000	Natural mixed	Free mixing
4001–4250	Multi-turn snippets	Sequential lines = same caller
4251–4500	Government services	Passport, FRSC, NIMC, NEPA, customs
4501–4750	Legal / religious / security	Lawyer, mosque, church, NSCDC, embassy
4751–5000	Misc Nigerian specialty	Vet, funeral planner, photography, etc.

The 30 core sectors used in lines 1–4000 include: restaurant, hotel, catering, bakery, event hall, supermarket, online shopping, fashion boutique, phone shop, pharmacy, hospital, dental, lab, salon, spa, gym, bank, microfinance, insurance, telecom, internet, cable TV, petrol/gas, ride-hailing, logistics, airline, mechanic, real estate, home services, education.

File format

Plain UTF-8 text. One sentence per line, prefixed with its 1-indexed number:

1. <sentence>
2. <sentence>
...
5000. <sentence>

Sentence durations target 4–25 seconds of spoken Nigerian speech at ~2.5 words/sec (so a 12-word line ≈ 5 sec; a 50-word line ≈ 20 sec). This makes the corpus directly suitable as ASR transcript prompts when paired with audio recordings.

Sample sentences

Hausa ↔ English:

Sannu, ina son in yi reservation for tonight, table for two at 7pm.

Igbo ↔ English:

Ndewo, achọrọ m ka m book table for two at Genesis Restaurant Onitsha echi abalị.

Yoruba ↔ English:

Bawo, mo fẹ́ book table for two at Nkoyo Lekki this Saturday evening.

Intended use

Multilingual ASR training (when paired with audio recordings)
Code-switching detection and language identification
Customer-service NLU and intent classification
TTS prompt corpora for Nigerian languages
Evaluation benchmarks for low-resource African speech systems
Conversational-AI fine-tuning for Nigerian-market voice assistants

Quality notes (honest internal assessment)

Quality is not uniform across the 5,000-line files. We are publishing the full corpus rather than only the high-quality subsets, so users can make their own filtering decisions.

File	Lines 1–3000	Lines 3001–4500	Lines 4501–5000
Hausa-English	Gold quality throughout	Gold quality	Gold quality
Igbo-English	Gold quality	Acceptable; templating in places	Weaker — some Hausa-language leakage, template loops
Yoruba-English	Gold quality	Acceptable	Weaker — ceremony/festival sections repetitive

Recommendation for downstream training: prefer the first 3,000 lines of each file for highest-quality subsets. The middle and later sections (3001–5000) cover broader vocabulary (government, legal, religious, Nigerian specialty) but show more pattern repetition — useful for breadth, less so for quality benchmarks.

We welcome feedback and pull requests at github.com/Orinode-ltd.

Methodology

These sentences were authored by hand — no LLM generation, no web scraping, no machine translation of monolingual corpora. Each sentence was written line-by-line by Nigerian-fluent contributors, then reviewed against the section ratio targets.

Code-switching follows natural Nigerian patterns: proper nouns (places, brands, currencies, numbers) stay in English even in target-language-heavy sentences; verbs and connectives follow the section ratio; greetings use the indigenous language (Sannu, Ndewo, Bawo).

Limitations

Text only. No audio. This is a transcript corpus. Audio recording is a planned follow-up.
Customer-service domain. Not suitable as-is for general conversational AI in other domains (medical, legal, casual chat).
Lagos / Southwest / Igbo-East / Northern dialects of these languages exist — the corpus reflects the standard written form most callers would use, not regional spoken variation.
No personal data. All names, phone numbers, account numbers are fictional.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@misc{orinode_ccs_2026,
  title  = {Naija Customer-Call Code-Switch Corpus},
  author = {{Orinode Ltd}},
  year   = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/Orinode/naija-customer-call-code-switch}
}

License

CC-BY 4.0 — free for commercial and non-commercial use with attribution.

Contact

Orinode Ltd · RC 9486856 · Lagos, Nigeria.