The Estonian Foreign Accent Corpus (EFAC) is a speech corpus of Estonian read and spontaneous speech produced by native and non-native speakers. The corpus was initiated in 2006 to support experimental phonetic studies of foreign accent, non-native Estonian pronunciation, and language-technology development.

The corpus includes speakers from 18 first-language backgrounds, including a native Estonian reference group. The prompt set includes 130 neutral Estonian sentences covering major Estonian phonological oppositions, 8 questions, 2 passages, and prompts for spontaneous speech such as self-introduction and picture description.

Dataset structure

Audio files are organized by first-language code and speaker:

<L1>/<speaker>/<utterance>.wav

This directory also contains generated metadata files:

metadata.csv: utterance-level metadata, including transcripts.
speaker_metadata.csv: speaker-level questionnaire metadata

The utterance-level metadata.csv columns are:

file_name: relative path to the WAV file.
ID: utterance identifier.
L1: speaker first language as ISO 639-3 code.
speaker: speaker identifier prefixed with ISO 639-3 L1 code.
gender: speaker gender.
proficiency: self-assessed Estonian proficiency, with native Estonian speakers marked as native.
text: normalized transcript text.

Statistics

Statistics below are computed from the current metadata.csv and speaker_metadata.csv files.

Measure	Value
Utterances with metadata and transcripts	31,835
Speakers	206
First-language backgrounds	18
Total audio duration	43.49 hours
Average utterance duration	4.92 seconds
Transcript tokens, whitespace-counted	199,278

Utterances by first language

L1	Utterances	Speakers
aze	157	1
dan	311	2
deu	2,720	17
eng	899	5
est	3,116	21
fin	4,548	30
fra	2,006	13
hin	551	3
ita	882	6
jpn	1,020	7
lav	2,927	21
lit	1,709	12
nld	314	2
pol	343	2
rus	8,237	50
slk	291	2
spa	808	5
swe	996	7

Utterances by speaker metadata

Gender	Utterances
Female	19,154
Male	12,681

Proficiency	Utterances
elementary	5,309
intermediate	11,267
advanced	8,811
proficient	3,332
native	3,116

Reference

For a description of the corpus and examples of EFAC-based research, see:

Lya Meister and Einar Meister. "Foreign Accent Corpus and studies of non-native speech." Keel ja Kirjandus. DOI: 10.54013/kk658a10.

Article page: https://www.keeljakirjandus.ee/ee/archives/24463
English article page: https://keeljakirjandus.ee/en/archives/24464

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