A First South African Corpus of Multilingual Code-switched Soap Opera Speech

We introduce a speech corpus containing multilingual code-switching compiled from South African soap operas. The corpus contains English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana and Sesotho speech, paired into four language-balanced subcorpora containing English-isiZulu, English-isiXhosa, English-Setswana and English-Sesotho. In total, the corpus contains 14.3 hours of annotated and segmented speech. The soap opera speech is typically fast, spontaneous and may express emotion, with a speech rate that is between 1.22 and 1.83 times higher than prompted speech in the same languages. Among the 10343 code-switched utterances in the corpus, 19207 intrasentential language switches are observed. Insertional code-switching with English words is observed to be most frequent. Intraword code-switching, where English words are supplemented with Bantu affixes in an effort to conform to Bantu phonology, is also observed. Most bigrams containing code-switching occur only once, making up between 64% and 92% of such bigrams in each subcorpus.