Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2026 / Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbrücken Dialect Speech Corpus

Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbrücken Dialect Speech Corpus

Paper · 2026 · Lena Sophie Oberkircher, Jesujoba Alabi, Dietrich Klakow et al.

Summary

Speech and language technologies are built mostly on standard varieties, so German dialects, which many people still speak daily, are poorly supported. Before this work, the Saarbrücken dialect, a Rhine Franconian variety of Saarland, had almost no speech data; only a small Bible MMS corpus existed. The authors built Saar-Voice, a parallel text–audio corpus. They first assembled a dialect text collection from four digitized dialect books, from digital texts by local community authors, and from MASSIVE sentences that were translated into the dialect and localized. Nine native speakers then read a subset of this text aloud, producing roughly six hours of recordings. The paper analyses both the text and the audio. It also discusses practical difficulties: the dialect has no standard spelling, so the same word is written in many ways, and speakers vary. In addition, it explores grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion. The resulting aligned resource is intended as a basis for dialect-aware TTS, especially zero-shot and few-shot adaptation in low-resource settings.

Key points

  • The audio part has 4,871 recorded sentences from 9 speakers (4 female, 5 male). Total duration is 05:54:48, and sentences average 4.37 s (range 1.59–14.02 s).
  • The text collection has 8,772 sentences, 75,280 words and 11,303 unique words. Its four book sources, made up largely of poetry and prose, are Was wääs dann isch, Saa, was de willschd, Geschaffd - Gelääbd and An da Saar gefonn.
  • Locally sourced community texts supply 2,838 sentences (32.4% of the text). A further 101 MASSIVE sentences were translated with the Saarbrücker Wörterbuch. In these, named entities were swapped for local ones and numbers were spelled out in dialect form.
  • Because there is no standard orthography, one word can have many spellings, such as gebbd/gäbd/gebbt. Writers may also use non-standard diacritics such as ò.
  • The dataset is published on Hugging Face as UdS-LSV/Saar-Voice.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Saarland UniversitySaarbrücken · Germany148 works · 18,287 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Speech & spoken language · 480 works

Cite

Cite as Lena Sophie Oberkircher, Jesujoba Alabi, Dietrich Klakow and Jürgen Trouvain. 2026. Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbrücken Dialect Speech Corpus. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP –- A Resource Perspective.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/2xvbjjktadtu

@inproceedings{oberkircher2026saar,
  title = {{Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbrücken Dialect Speech Corpus}},
  author = {Lena Sophie Oberkircher, Jesujoba Alabi, Dietrich Klakow and Jürgen Trouvain},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP –- A Resource Perspective},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/2xvbjjktadtu},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2xvbjjktadtu}
}

References

59 references, 16 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Astrid Adler and Karolina Hansen. 2022. Dialekt und Beruf: neue Daten zu Dialekten in Deutschland. Sprache in Zahlen: Folge 7. Sprachreport, 38(3):28–33. find
  2. Afroz Ahamad, Ankit Anand, and Pranesh Bhargava. 2020. AccentDB: A database of non-native English accents to assist neural speech recognition. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5351–5358, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
  3. Minh Duc Bui, Carolin Holtermann, Valentin Hofmann, Anne Lauscher, and Katharina von der Wense. 2025. Large language models discriminate against speakers of German dialects. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8212–8240, Suzhou, China. Ass… find
  4. Orevaoghene Ahia, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Diana Abagyan, Hila Gonen, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Daud Abolade, Noah A. Smith, and Yulia Tsvetkov. 2024. Voices unheard: NLP resources and models for Yorùbá regional dialects. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processi… find
  5. Edresson Casanova, Kelly Davis, Eren Gölge, Görkem Göknar, Iulian Gulea, Logan Hart, Aya Aljafari, Joshua Meyer, Reuben Morais, Samuel Olayemi, and Julian Weber. 2024. XTTS: a Massively Multilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Model. In Interspeech 2024, pages 4978–4982. find
  6. Mona Diab. 2016. Processing dialectal Arabic: Exploiting variability and similarity to overcome challenges and discover opportunities. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial3), page 42, Osaka, Japan.
  7. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee. find
  8. Alham Fikri Aji, Genta Indra Winata, Fajri Koto, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Ade Romadhony, Rahmad Mahendra, Kemal Kurniawan, David Moeljadi, Radityo Eko Prasojo, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau, and Sebastian Ruder. 2022. One country, 700+ languages: NLP challenges for underrepresented languages and dialects… find
  9. Amirbek Djanibekov, Hawau Olamide Toyin, Raghad Alshalan, Abdullah Alatir, and Hanan Aldarmaki. 2025. Dialectal coverage and generalization in Arabic speech recognition. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 29490–29…
  10. Jesujoba O. Alabi, Cheng Gong, Erica Cooper, Yu Jiang, Dietrich Klakow, and Junichi Yamagishi. 2025a. Submission from ZMM-TTS for Blizzard Phat Do, Matt Coler, Jelske Dijkstra, Igor Marchenko, Vass Verkhodanova, and Sebastien Le Maguer. 2025. find
  11. The Blizzard Challenge 2025. In The Blizzard Challenge 2025, pages 1–17. find
  12. What a creole wants, what a creole needs. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6439–6449, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association. find
  13. Christoph Draxler and Klaus Jänsch. 2004. SpeechRecorder - A universal platform independent multi-channel audio recording software. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04), Lisbon, Portugal. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). find
  14. Yinghao Aaron Li, Cong Han, Vinay Raghavan, Gavin Mischler, and Nima Mesgarani. 2023. Styletts 2: Towards human-level text-to-speech through style diffusion and adversarial training with large speech language models. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 36, pages 19594–19621.… find
  15. Chris Chinenye Emezue, Ifeoma Okoh, Chinedu Emmanuel Mbonu, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Daisy Monika Lal, Ignatius Ezeani, Paul Rayson, Ijemma Onwuzulike, Chukwuma Onyebuchi Okeke, Gerald Okey Nweya, Bright Ikechukwu Ogbonna, Chukwuebuka Uchenna Oraegbunam, Esther Chidinma Awo-Ndubuisi, and Akudo Amarachuk… find
  16. Shervin Malmasi and Marcos Zampieri. 2016. Arabic dialect identification in speech transcripts. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (Var-Dial3), pages 106–113, Osaka, Japan.
  17. The COL-ING 2016 Organizing Committee. find
  18. David R. Mortensen, Siddharth Dalmia, and Patrick Littell. 2018. Epitran: Precision G2P for many languages. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Paris, France. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
  19. Cheng Gong, Xin Wang, Erica Cooper, Dan Wells, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang, Korin Richmond, and Junichi Yamagishi. 2024. Zmm-tts: Zero-shot multilingual and multispeaker speech synthesis conditioned on self-supervised discrete speech representations. IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio, Speech and Lang. Proc., 32:… find
  20. Alberto Muñoz-Ortiz, Verena Blaschke, and Barbara Plank. 2025. Evaluating pixel language models on non-standardized languages. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6412–6419, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  21. Imane Guellil, Houda Saâdane, Faical Azouaou, Billel Gueni, and Damien Nouvel. 2021. Arabic natural language processing: An overview. Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences, 33(5):497–507.
  22. Tobi Olatunji, Tejumade Afonja, Aditya Yadavalli, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Sahib Singh, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Joanne Osuchukwu, Salomey Osei, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Naome Etori, and Clinton Mbataku. 2023. AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African accented speech dataset for clinical and general domain ASR. Trans…
  23. Chanwoo Kim and Richard M. Stern. 2008. Robust signal-to-noise ratio estimation based on waveform amplitude distribution analysis. In Interspeech 2008, pages 2598–2601. find
  24. Aidan Pine. 2025. The NRCC Submission to the Blizzard Challenge 2025. In The Blizzard Challenge 2025, pages 24–30. find
  25. Klaus Kohler. 1990. German. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 20(1):48–50. find
  26. Xaver Maria Krückl, Verena Blaschke, and Barbara Plank. 2025. Improving dialectal slot and intent detection with auxiliary tasks: A multi-dialectal Bavarian case study. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, pages 128–146, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Associatio… find
  27. Alan Ramponi. 2024. Language varieties of Italy: Technology challenges and opportunities. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 12:19–38.
  28. Bashar Talafha, Hawau Olamide Toyin, Peter Sullivan, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Abdurrahman Juma, Amirbek Djanibekov, Chiyu Zhang, Hamad Alshehhi, Hanan Aldarmaki, Mustafa Heather Lent, Kelechi Ogueji, Miryam de Lhoneux, Orevaoghene Ahia, and Anders Søgaard. 2022. find
  29. Jarrar, Nizar Habash, and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed. 2025. find
  30. NADI 2025: The first multidialectal Arabic speech processing shared task. In Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 720–733, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  31. Soumi Maiti, Karen Livescu, and Shinji Watanabe. 2024. Towards robust speech representation learning for thousands of languages. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10205–10224, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistic… find
  32. Zedian Xiao, William Held, Yanchen Liu, and Diyi Yang. 2023. Task-agnostic low-rank adapters for unseen English dialects. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7857–7870, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  33. Alexis Conneau, Min Ma, Simran Khanuja, Yu Zhang, Vera Axelrod, Siddharth Dalmia, Jason Riesa, Clara Rivera, and Ankur Bapna. 2022. Fleurs: Few-shot learning evaluation of universal representations of speech. 2022 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), pages 798–805.
  34. Marcos Zampieri, Preslav Nakov, and Yves Scherrer. 2020. Natural language processing for similar languages, varieties, and dialects: A survey. Natural Language Engineering, 26(6):595–612. find
  35. Georg Drenda. 2008. Kleiner linksrheinischer Dialektatlas. Sprache in Rheinland-Pfalz und im Saarland. Franz Steiner Verlag. 11. find
  36. Peter Eckert. 1995. Was wääs dann isch ...?! : hundertzwanzigmal Mundart von der Saar. Klein-stLiteratur aus der edition händmäid. KleinstVerl. Die Kiste, Wadgassen-Differten. find
  37. Language Resource References Fahim Faisal, Orevaoghene Ahia, Aarohi Srivastava, Kabir Ahuja, David Chiang, Yulia Tsvetkov, and Antonios Anastasopoulos. 2024. DIALECT-BENCH: An NLP benchmark for dialects, varieties, and closely-related languages. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Assoc… find
  38. Verena Blaschke, Barbara Kovačić, Siyao Peng, Hinrich Schütze, and Barbara Plank. 2024. MaiBaam: A multi-dialectal Bavarian Universal Dependency treebank. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pag… find
  39. Verena Blaschke, Miriam Winkler, Constantin Förster, Gabriele Wenger-Glemser, and Barbara Plank. 2025. A Multi-Dialectal Dataset for German Dialect ASR and Dialect-to-Standard Speech Translation. In Interspeech 2025, pages 913–917.
  40. Jack FitzGerald, Christopher Hench, Charith Peris, Scott Mackie, Kay Rottmann, Ana Sanchez, Aaron Nash, Liam Urbach, Vishesh Kakarala, Richa Singh, Swetha Ranganath, Laurie Crist, Misha Britan, Wouter Leeuwis, Gokhan Tur, and Prem Natarajan. 2023. MASSIVE: A 1M-example multilingual natural language… find
  41. Damian Blasi, Antonios Anastasopoulos, and Graham Neubig. 2022. Systematic inequalities in language technology performance across the world’s languages. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5486–5505, Dublin, Irelan…
  42. Georg Fox. 1994. Geschaffd - gelääbd: saarländische Mundarttexte. cjm-Verlag, Speyer. find
  43. Edith Braun. 1991. Necknamen der Saar und drum herum. Hempel-Verlag, Lebach. find
  44. Georg Fox. 2012. Saa, was de willschd!: Mundart-Kolumnen. PVS-Edition, Heusweiler. find
  45. Edith Braun and Max Mangold. 1984. Saarbrücker Wörterbuch. Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag. find
  46. Kurt Jungmann, editor. 1993. An da Saar gefonn: volkstümliche Gedichte in Saarbrücker Mundart. Westwind-Verlag, Saarbrücken. find
  47. William Chen, Wangyou Zhang, Yifan Peng, Xinjian Li, Jinchuan Tian, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Florian Lux, Sarina Meyer, Lyonel Behringer, Frank Zalkow, Phat Do, Matt Coler, Emanuël A. P. Habets, and Ngoc Thang Vu. 2024. Meta Learning Text-to-Speech Synthesis in over 7000 Languages. In Interspeech… find
  48. Lothar Steitz. 1981. Grammatik der Saarbrücker Mundart. Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag. find
  49. Jörgen Valk and Tanel Alumäe. 2020. Voxlingua107: A dataset for spoken language recognition. 2021 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), pages 652–658. find
  50. Min Ma, Yuma Koizumi, Shigeki Karita, Heiga Zen, Jason Riesa, Haruko Ishikawa, and Michiel Bacchiani. 2024. FLEURS-R: A Restored Multilingual Speech Corpus for Generation Tasks. In Interspeech 2024, pages 1835–1839. find
  51. Thorsten Müller. 2024. ff427ec). find
  52. Changhan Wang, Morgane Riviere, Ann Lee, Anne Wu, Chaitanya Talnikar, Daniel Haziza, Mary Williamson, Juan Pino, and Emmanuel Dupoux. 2021. VoxPopuli: A large-scale multilingual speech corpus for representation learning, semi-supervised learning and interpretation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual…
  53. Tv-44khz-full (revision Frederico S. Oliveira, Edresson Casanova, Arnaldo Candido Junior, Anderson S. Soares, and Arlindo R. Galvão Filho. 2023. Cml-tts: A multilingual dataset for speech synthesis in low-resource languages. In Text, Speech, and Dialogue, pages 188–199, Cham. Springer Nature Switzer… find
  54. Michel Plüss, Lukas Neukom, Christian Scheller, and Manfred Vogel. Swiss parliaments corpus, an automatically aligned Swiss German speech to standard German text corpus. find
  55. Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Anuroop Sriram, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Ronan Collobert. 2020. MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research. In Interspeech 2020, pages 2757–2761.
  56. Michael Pucher, Carina Lozo, and Sylvia Moosmüller. 2017. Phone mapping and prosodic transfer in speech synthesis of similar dialect pairs. In Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2017, pages 180–185. TUDpress, Dresden. find
  57. Michael Pucher, Friedrich Neubarth, Volker Strom, Sylvia Moosmüller, Gregor Hofer, Christian Kran-zler, Gudrun Schuchmann, and Dietmar Schabus. 2010. Resources for speech synthesis of viennese varieties. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LRE… find
  58. Dietmar Schabus, Michael Pucher, and Gregor Hofer. 2013. Joint audiovisual hidden semi-markov model-based speech synthesis. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 8(2):336–347. find
  59. Ingmar Steiner, Sébastien Le Maguer, Judith Manzoni, Peter Gilles, and Jürgen Trouvain. 2017. Developing new language tools for MaryTTS: the case of Luxembourgish. In Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2017, pages 186–192. TUDpress, Dresden. find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/oberkircher-2026-saar-voice-multi-speaker-saarbrucken/