Lagos-concentrated, so co-located with the buyers. Absent from ElevenLabs TTS, AWS Transcribe and Google Chirp 3; ElevenLabs' own published STT band for it is 25–50% WER.
- yor
- Tonal
- 7 dialects
49 AI readiness
46m
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Extremely low-resource
15m
speakers, low confidence estimate
31
AI readiness, weighted toward speech
3
dialects tracked as separate collection targets
The Sahel's main lingua franca, and the clearest case where humanitarian and agricultural demand arrives long before commercial demand. Mande rather than Bantu or Volta-Niger, so none of the transfer learning elsewhere in this catalogue reaches it.A few million first-language speakers and perhaps ten million more who use it as Mali's lingua franca. Which of those a figure counts is never stated, so the figure is never comparable.
Capability coverage
Under ten hours, benchmark-only presence. Collection required before anything ships.
The facts
Dialects
Dialect is self-declared at contribution and then validated against gold-standard clips. Which dialects people turn up to record in is a better demand signal than any desk ranking.
Open corpora that cover it
Voices
No voice yet. Studio recording is the scarcest asset in this whole field — the largest open African corpus holds 11,000 hours and about twenty of them are studio-grade — so voices follow demand rather than leading it.
Same family
Related
A Yoruba model helps Igbo less than the shared border suggests, and a Hausa model transfers usefully across Chadic languages in three other countries. These share Niger–Congo with Bambara.
Lagos-concentrated, so co-located with the buyers. Absent from ElevenLabs TTS, AWS Transcribe and Google Chirp 3; ElevenLabs' own published STT band for it is 25–50% WER.
49 AI readiness
46m
Commercially dense in trade and diaspora remittances. Absent from AWS Transcribe entirely and capped at Chirp 2 on Google.
49 AI readiness
33m
The highest-value regional asset after Hausa: cross-border into Niger, Cameroon and Chad, with strong humanitarian and agricultural demand.
18 AI readiness
20m±
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