Low German

Common Voice
#1

Hi.

Are there any people here who are interested in adding Lower German (“Plattdeutsch”) as a new language? Lower German is not just a German dialect but a real language. Its ISO 639-2 code ist nds and it even has its own Wikipedia version: https://nds.wikipedia.org

We don’t have to translate the website because everyone who speaks Lower German can also understand German or English (German emigrants to the U.S. who still speak Lower German today).

There might be a problem in finding enough texts to read that use a CC0 license. However, there is a lot of older material from authors like Gorch Fock which is public domain today. Wikisource has a nice collection of such texts: https://wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Plattdüütsch

3 Likes
#2

I agree that would be a great stuff

1 Like
#3

Great initiative! You can use the low german Wikipedia if you use the sentence extractor: https://github.com/common-voice/cv-sentence-extractor

This tool extracts max three sentences per article, so they can be used as public domain under American law.

Here is a older thread with all the needed steps to add a language to common voice: 📖 Readme: How to see my language on Common Voice