A Haleyouth Foundation programme
Ẹ́bírà lives here.
Four million people speak Ebira, yet the language barely exists online. No dictionary, no translator, no record a young person in Lagos or London can reach. Ebira.net is the platform Haleyouth Foundation is building to change that, openly and with the community.
Hear the language before you read about it
The problem, briefly
A major language with almost no digital footprint.
There is no single place online where a young Ebira person in Lagos, London, or Houston can look up a word, hear it spoken correctly, read a riddle their grandmother knew, or start learning from scratch. Haleyouth Foundation already runs the pieces. Ebira.net holds them together.
0M
Ebira speakers
across Kogi, Nasarawa, Edo, Ondo, and the FCT
0+
words already collected
in the 2024 public word-collection exercise
0
dialects to document
Tao, Etuno, and Igu
0
presence in global datasets
absent from NLLB-200, Common Voice, and FLEURS. That changes here
One platform, nine pillars
Nine pillars, each making the others stronger.
The dictionary feeds the translator. Contributors grow the corpus, and the corpus gives the language a voice. Nothing here stands alone, and nothing waits for everything else to finish.
How it works
Preserve, engage, enable.
Preserve
Turn scattered words, riddles, proverbs, stories, and recordings into an open, structured, permanent digital record.
Engage
Give the diaspora and young people a living reason to return to the language: learn it, contribute to it, and connect around it.
Enable
Provide the data, tooling, and credibility that open the door to grants, research partnerships, and formal Ebira-language education.
The roadmap
We do not wait for the whole platform to be finished. The plan runs two years, from foundation to a university-backed education pathway.
Phase 0
Foundation
- Landing page, brand, and mailing list
- Data schema and design system
- Import the 800+ word seed
- Governance and licensing signed off
Phase 1
Dictionary, App & Corpus
- Dictionary with search, audio, dialects
- Translator in word-and-phrase mode
- Contribute tool and validation queue
- Public API v1 and first open release
Phase 2
Heritage, People & Diaspora
- Riddles, proverbs, stories, and songs
- Ebira History and the People’s Encyclopedia
- Diaspora Hub and community campaigns
- Learn Ebira beginner track, full mobile app
Phase 3
Education & Voice
- Sentence-level translation, ASR and TTS
- Structured curriculum and certificates
- University partnership toward a degree pathway
- Teacher training and classroom materials
Built with the community
Rooted in Ebiraland, reviewed by its custodians.
Ebira.net rests on six years of Haleyouth’s work in Ebira-speaking territory. Under the plan, a Community Advisory Board signs off on sensitive content and a Chief Language Advisor has the final say on orthography and lexical correctness, so the community keeps authority over its own language.
Planned partnership
Ebira Development Project (EDP), Okene
Dictionary, encyclopaedia, and orthographic authority
Planned engagement
Ohinoyi of Ebiraland’s Office
Community endorsement and access
In active discussion
Kogi State University, Anyigba
Linguistic review, ethics oversight, degree pathway
In active discussion
Federal University Lokoja
Orthographic standardisation and curriculum
Corpus community
Masakhane African Languages Hub
Peer review, benchmarks, and data reuse
Join us
Ebira diaspora associations
Membership, micro-funding, and events
Open corpus & API
Open by default, owned by the community.
Every dataset ships CC BY 4.0 and every line of code Apache 2.0. Contributors consent at submission, are credited unless they choose anonymity, and may withdraw within a defined window. A versioned read API serves Masakhane teams, university labs, and app developers. This is the data spine that moves Ebira toward the resource-rich languages.
Follow the build on GitHub- 75 h
- Ebira speech targeted in the corpus
- 25,000
- parallel Ebira–English sentences
- 2,000+
- headwords with audio in Phase 1
- v1
- public read API for researchers
Be first through the door
Add your name, then add the first word you remember.
Join the waitlist for launch news, contributor drives, and diaspora events. Wherever you live, the language has a place for you.
Ready now? Preview the contribute flow and see how a word travels from your memory to the dictionary.