HinDialect: 26 Hindi-related languages and dialects of the Indic Continuum in North India

Languages This is a collection of folksongs for 26 languages that form a dialect continuum in North India and nearby regions.

Namely Angika, Awadhi, Baiga, Bengali, Bhadrawahi, Bhili, Bhojpuri, Braj, Bundeli, Chhattisgarhi, Garhwali, Gujarati, Haryanvi, Himachali, Hindi, Kanauji, Khadi Boli, Korku, Kumaoni, Magahi, Malvi, Marathi, Nimadi, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit.

This data is originally collected by the Kavita Kosh Project at http://www.kavitakosh.org/ . Here are the main characteristics of the languages in this collection: - They are all Indic languages except for Korku. - The majority of them are closely related to the standard Hindi dialect genealogically (such as Hariyanvi and Bhojpuri), although the collection also contains languages such as Bengali and Gujarati which are more distant relatives. - They are all primarily spoken in (North) India (Bengali is also spoken in Bangladesh) - All except Sanksrit are alive languages

Data Categorising them by pre-existing available NLP resources, we have: * Band 1 languages : Hindi, Panjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Nepali. These languages already have other large standard datasets available. Kavita Kosh may have very little data for these languages. * Band 2 languages: Bhojpuri, Magahi, Awadhi, Braj. These languages have growing interest and some datasets of a relatively small size as compared to Band 1 language resources. * Band 3 languages: All other languages in the collection are previously zero-resource languages. These are the languages for which this dataset is the most relevant.

Script This dataset is entirely in Devanagari. Content in the case of languages not written in Devanagari (such as Bengali and Gujarati) has been transliterated by the Kavita Kosh Project.

Format The dataset contains a single text file containing folksongs per language. Folksongs are separated from each other by an empty line. The first line of a new piece is the title of the folksong, and line separation within folksongs is preserved.