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
1.2m
speakers, low confidence estimate
5
AI readiness, weighted toward speech
2
dialects tracked as separate collection targets
Middle Belt. Collection here needs a named funder — a state contract or a research grant — before it is worth starting.No primary-source figure. Shown as a band midpoint.
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
None at scale. Everything for this language has to be collected, which is why it sits where it does in the tiers rather than in a roadmap.
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 Nupe.
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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