---
language:
  - zul
  - xho
  - nbl
  - ssw
license: apache-2.0
annotations_creators:
  - no-annotation
language_creators:
  - found
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
source_datasets:
  - original
task_categories:
  - text-generation
task_ids:
  - language-modeling
pretty_name: South African Nguni Languages Dataset
tags:
  - south-african-languages
  - african-languages
  - indigenous-languages
  - nguni-languages
datasets:
  - HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2
---

# South African Nguni Languages Dataset

## Dataset Overview

| Language   | Training Documents | Training GPT2 Tokens | Avg Tokens/Doc | Max Tokens | Test Documents | Test GPT2 Tokens | Test Avg Tokens/Doc | Test Max Tokens |
| ---------- | -----------------: | -------------------: | -------------: | ---------: | -------------: | ---------------: | ------------------: | --------------: |
| isiZulu    |            116,693 |          192,622,799 |       1,650.68 |    335,530 |            687 |        1,080,961 |            1,573.45 |          15,691 |
| isiXhosa   |             99,567 |          141,484,241 |       1,421.00 |    113,710 |            788 |        1,161,296 |            1,473.73 |          17,220 |
| isiNdebele |             21,922 |           17,533,799 |         799.83 |     42,701 |            222 |          170,111 |              766.27 |           6,615 |
| siSwati    |              1,668 |            3,148,007 |       1,887.29 |     24,129 |             17 |           29,753 |            1,750.18 |           6,682 |

This dataset covers all four of South Africa's Nguni languages, which are part of the Southern Bantu language family.

## Dataset Structure

### Data Fields

- `text`: The text content of the document
- `language`: The language of the text (one of: isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele, siSwati)

### Data Splits

The dataset is divided into training and test splits as shown in the table above.

## Data Source

This dataset was processed from the FineWeb-2 dataset available on HuggingFace:
https://huggingface.co./datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2

## Additional Information

- **License**: Apache 2.0
- **Version**: 1.0.0
- **Collection Date**: January 2025

## Language Information

The Nguni languages included in this dataset are:

- **isiZulu**: The most widely spoken language in South Africa
- **isiXhosa**: The second most spoken Nguni language
- **isiNdebele**: Also known as South Ndebele or Southern Ndebele
- **siSwati**: Also known as Swati or Swazi