SPONTANEOUS SPEECH LANGUAGE REQUEST: Efik (efk)

[JoeAIStudio]

Description:
This issue requests the addition of the Efik (efk) language to Mozilla Common Voice for Spontaneous Speech. Efik is an indigenous language spoken mainly in Cross River and Akwa Ibom States, Nigeria, with deep cultural and historical significance. Adding Efik will help promote linguistic diversity, digital inclusion, and open data access for African languages. I (Joseph Okon) am volunteering to support community building, data collection, and validation for Efik on Common Voice.

Pontoon Set-up

Language name
Efik

Language code
efk (ISO 639-3)

Language size
Approximately 400,000–600,000 active speakers

Plural forms
Efik does not typically mark plurals by adding “-s” like English.
Plurality is often indicated through context or quantifiers.

Examples (translated to show structure):
0 nkpo (things)
1 nkpo
2 nkpo
3 nkpo
4 nkpo
5 nkpo
10 nkpo
20 nkpo
100 nkpo
1000 nkpo

Mmi ke esit nte nkpo edi ke ufok (I see 0 things on the ground)
Mmi ke esit nkpo kiet edi ke ufok (I see 1 thing on the ground)
Mmi ke esit nkpo duop edi ke ufok (I see 10 things on the ground)
Mmi ke esit nkpo edi ke ufok (I see things on the ground)

Pontoon manager
https://pontoon.mozilla.org/contributors/joecolenets/

Language Script
Latin

Sentence Collection Requirements

Sentence Requirement Band
☑️ Band A

(Efik has a speaker population under 1 million and limited digital resources, so Band A fits best — starting with 750 sentences.)

Creating Community

Why do you want to take part in Common Voice?
I want to help preserve and promote the Efik language digitally. As an indigenous language spoken mainly in Cross River and Akwa Ibom States of Nigeria, Efik lacks digital presence and voice datasets. Through Common Voice, I hope to help build an open-source dataset that empowers local developers, researchers, and AI tools to understand Efik better — making technology more inclusive for our community.

Would you like to have a follow-up conversation regarding community building?
Yes, I’d love to have a follow-up conversation. I’m interested in building a small volunteer network of Efik speakers and content creators to support data collection, validation, and outreach once the language is live on Common Voice.

[bandrandr]

Hi @JoeAIStudio! There's been some confusion: this information is needed for Efik to be added to Scripted Speech, and you've already provided it in another issue (#5166). For Spontaneous Speech, other information is needed, as well as at least 60 questions for the speakers of Efik to answer. If you could provide us with that data, using the template below? And sorry again for the delay!

Welcome to the Common Voice Community!

Thank you for your interest in adding a new language to the Common Voice Spontaneous Speech platform and dataset.

Necessary metadata

• Language to add to Spontaneous Speech:
• ISO code:

Questions

A list of 60 or more questions in your language that speakers will respond to as they contribute to the Spontaneous Speech dataset. These questions will act as prompts and should allow a speaker to respond to them in roughly 10-25 seconds. These prompts should be culturally appropriate for the language community. These questions should not encourage speakers to share personally identifiable information.

How to write good prompts

Writing prompts can be hard at first, to get you started here are some examples of prompts that have been used in other languages include:

• What do people in your community usually do to celebrate birthdays?
• What is your favourite season and why?
• How do you think access to technology is changing the way people connect to each other?

It’s very important to avoid including prompts that could encourage people to share personally identifiable information. Examples of personally identifiable information that speakers should not use in their responses to prompts includes:

• Names of the speaker, or their family members.
• Phone numbers, email addresses or physical addresses/locations
• Information about their medical, financial or business information

What happens next

After the issue is created, we would need at least two other speakers of your language to look through them; unfortunately we can't change the questions once they're in the system.

Your prompts go here

Please type or copy your prompts/questions here, with each question on a new line: