---
license: mit
language:
- sd
task_categories:
- text-generation
- fill-mask
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
pretty_name: Sindhi Texts (big dataset)
tags:
- sindhi
- sindhi-language
- low-resource
- pretraining-corpus
---

# Sindhi Texts (big dataset)

A large plain-text corpus of Sindhi (سنڌي), assembled for pretraining language models. It
combines material digitized by Sindhi literary institutions and forums, a Sindhi encyclopedia,
newspaper archives, a classical dictionary, and the Sindhi portions of two web-crawl corpora.

**3.19 GB, ~1.81 billion characters, ~390,000 documents across 9 sources.** With a
Sindhi-specific 12k SentencePiece tokenizer that is roughly **530M tokens** (3.2–3.5
characters per token, measured per source; treat as an estimate).

Most of the corpus is one document per file. Two sources are exceptions, described below.

## Contents

| Source | Items | Size | Characters | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| `fineweb2/` | 260,662 docs in 1 `.jsonl` | 1.30 GB | 735 M | Sindhi (`snd_Arab`) subset of FineWeb2 (train+test) |
| `sindhiadabiboard.org/` | 900 files | 780 MB | ~444 M | Sindhi Adabi Board — books, magazines, poetry, history, reference works |
| `books.sindhsalamat.com/` | 2,747 files | 516 MB | ~295 M | Book library digitized by the Sindh Salamat forum |
| `CC100-Sindhi/` | 81,062 docs in 1 `.txt` | 420 MB | 238 M | Sindhi portion of CC100 |
| `newspapers/` | 26,534 files | 93 MB | 52 M | Newspaper and columnist archives, 3 outlets — a small sample of what exists, see limitations |
| `sindhiana.org/` | 18,976 files | 50 MB | ~28 M | Sindhiana, the Sindhi encyclopedia — still in publication, ~2 volumes to come |
| `quran.sindhsalamat.com/` | 14 files | 22 MB | 13 M | 14 complete Sindhi translations of the Quran — 2 more and a tafsir still pending |
| `jamesindhilughaat/` | 91 files | 12 MB | 6.9 M | Jamé Sindhi Lughat — 3-volume classical dictionary |
| `blogs/` | 1 file | 0.3 MB | 0.2 M | `bhurgri.com`, a single scraped blog |

Character counts are exact for `fineweb2`, `CC100-Sindhi`, `newspapers` and
`quran.sindhsalamat.com`; elsewhere they are extrapolated from seeded 40-file samples.

### Two sources are not one-document-per-file

**`fineweb2/fineweb2_snd.jsonl`** — JSON Lines, one document per physical line, each object
exactly `{"text": "..."}`. Only the `text` column of the source parquet shards is kept.
JSONL rather than plain text because FineWeb2 documents contain blank lines, so a flattened
`.txt` cannot be split back into documents: doing so yields 264,298 blocks for the real
260,662 documents. JSON escapes newlines inside the string, so here the line count *is* the
document count.

**`CC100-Sindhi/sd.txt`** — kept in the upstream CC100 format: one document per
blank-line-separated block, 81,062 in total. Because it arrives already flattened, its
document boundaries carry the same ambiguity described above, so treat blank-line splitting
as approximate.

## Layout

```
sindhiadabiboard.org/{Litrature,mehran,Navel,Lateefyat,...}/BookN.txt
books.sindhsalamat.com/<id>.txt
sindhiana.org/<first letter>/<article title>.txt
quran.sindhsalamat.com/<translation>.txt
jamesindhilughaat/vol{1,2,3}/<section>/<file>.txt
newspapers/awami_awaz/{00..08}/aa_NNNNNN.txt
newspapers/sindhi_express/{00..02}/se_NNNNNN.txt
newspapers/kawish/<Author_Name>/kw_NNNNNN.txt
CC100-Sindhi/sd.txt
fineweb2/fineweb2_snd.jsonl
blogs/bhurgri.com.txt
```

`sindhiana.org` is sharded by the first letter of the article title, and the two newspaper
wire services into numbered shards of 2,000 files, so that no directory exceeds the Hub's
10,000-file limit. `kawish` is a columnist archive and is grouped by author (75 authors).
Newspaper files hold the headline on the first line, a blank line, then the article body.

All text files are UTF-8 with LF line endings and no BOM.

## Loading

The `.txt` sources, one document per file:

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset(
    "arnizamani/Sindhi-texts-big-dataset",
    data_files={"train": ["sindhiadabiboard.org/**/*.txt", "books.sindhsalamat.com/*.txt"]},
    sample_by="document",
)
```

FineWeb2, one document per line:

```python
ds = load_dataset(
    "arnizamani/Sindhi-texts-big-dataset",
    data_files="fineweb2/fineweb2_snd.jsonl",
    split="train",
)
```

Or read it as a stream, without materializing 1.3 GB in memory:

```python
import json
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

path = hf_hub_download("arnizamani/Sindhi-texts-big-dataset",
                       "fineweb2/fineweb2_snd.jsonl", repo_type="dataset")
with open(path, encoding="utf-8") as fh:
    for line in fh:
        text = json.loads(line)["text"]
```

## Provenance

| Source | How it was obtained |
|---|---|
| `sindhiadabiboard.org` | Scraped from the Sindhi Adabi Board digital library |
| `books.sindhsalamat.com` | Scraped from the Sindh Salamat book library |
| `sindhiana.org` | Scraped article by article from the Sindhiana encyclopedia |
| `quran.sindhsalamat.com` | Downloaded per translation |
| `jamesindhilughaat` | Word 97 (`.doc`) source documents, converted to UTF-8 text |
| `newspapers` | Article archives of Awami Awaz, Kawish and Sindhi Express, scraped as CSV, then converted to one file per article |
| `CC100-Sindhi` | The `sd` file of CC100 (`data.statmt.org/cc-100/`) |
| `fineweb2` | `snd_Arab` subset of `HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2`, re-extracted from its parquet shards |
| `blogs` | Single blog scrape |

### Processing applied

- **Exact-duplicate removal.** Byte-identical files were collapsed corpus-wide to one copy.
  Within the newspaper archives 1,858 duplicate articles were dropped before conversion — one
  outlet had scraped 1,655 URLs twice.
- **Dictionary conversion.** The 91 dictionary files were extracted through the Word document
  piece table, so "fast save" leftovers and deleted text are excluded, as are header and
  footnote streams.
- **Newspaper conversion.** One file per article; link, date and byline are deliberately kept
  out of the text. Articles under 200 characters and blank rows were dropped (238 rows). The
  columnist email address that one outlet appended to the end of most articles was removed
  (4,903 articles). Non-breaking spaces were normalised to plain spaces.
- **Filename hygiene.** Sindhi quotation marks were stripped from `sindhiana.org` filenames;
  author directory names are ASCII with underscores.
- **1,022 empty files removed** from `sindhiana.org` (failed scrapes).

Beyond that, no character filtering, Unicode normalisation or tokenizer-specific markup has
been applied. Text is kept as extracted, including characters a downstream pipeline may prefer
to strip.

## Known limitations

- **Uneven quality.** The two crawl-derived sources are 54% of all characters and are noisier
  than the curated book sources. Roughly 30% of CC100 documents are under 200 characters.
- **Newspapers are heavily under-represented.** Sindhi has tens of daily newspapers, several
  of them publishing for decades, which puts the realistic body of published Sindhi newspaper
  text in the millions of articles. What is here — 26,534 articles from three outlets, under
  3% of this corpus by characters — is well under 0.1% of that. Coverage is narrow in time too:
  every article carrying a date (2,919 of them) falls between 2014 and 2021, clustered in
  2015–2018. Contemporary journalistic prose, regional reporting and current-affairs
  vocabulary are correspondingly thin, and newspapers are the most promising direction for
  growing this dataset.
- **Near-duplicates remain.** Only byte-identical content was removed. Reprints across
  newspapers and boilerplate shared between crawled pages are still present.
- **The 14 Quran translations** are 14 renderings of one source text, which over-weights that
  material unless downsampled. The set is also not final: **two further translations are still
  to be downloaded** from Sindh Salamat, and **one tafsir (exegesis) work is pending and not
  yet available**. Both will be added once available, so expect this source to grow — the
  tafsir in particular is a different genre, commentary rather than translation, and will not
  duplicate the existing text.
- **`sindhiana.org` is short-form and incomplete.** Nearly 19,000 entries averaging under
  1,600 characters, some of them one-line cross-references. The encyclopedia itself is also
  still a work in progress: roughly two volumes remain unpublished, so what is here is only
  the portion published so far and the coverage of later alphabet ranges is thinner than it
  will eventually be.
- **Dictionary gaps.** Sections 44 and 48 are missing from volume 3, and three volume title
  pages are pure English. Both are upstream omissions.
- **Mixed script.** Latin-script fragments (URLs, transliterations, English quotations) occur
  throughout, most heavily in the crawl-derived sources.
- **No train/validation/test split** is provided; splitting is left to the consumer.

## Version history

- **2.0 — July 2026.** Added `fineweb2` (260,662 documents), `CC100-Sindhi` (81,062
  documents), `newspapers` (26,534 articles), `jamesindhilughaat` (91 dictionary sections) and
  `blogs`. Deduplicated corpus-wide, resharded `sindhiana.org` by first letter, removed 1,022
  empty files. Grew from 1.28 GB to 3.19 GB.
- **1.0 — January 2026.** `sindhiadabiboard.org`, `sindhiana.org`, `quran.sindhsalamat.com`,
  `books.sindhsalamat.com`.

## Licensing and attribution

The `license: mit` field above covers the compilation, organisation and conversion work in
this repository. It does not relicense the underlying texts, which come from several parties
on differing terms:

- `fineweb2` derives from `HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2`, released under the **Open Data Commons
  Attribution License (ODC-By 1.0)** and additionally subject to the Common Crawl Terms of
  Use. Attribution to FineWeb2 is required when using or redistributing it.
- `CC100-Sindhi` derives from CC100, likewise built from Common Crawl and subject to its
  Terms of Use.
- The book, encyclopedia, dictionary and newspaper material remains the **copyright of its
  respective authors and publishers**, and is included here to support research on a
  low-resource language. Rights holders who want material removed are welcome to open a
  discussion on this repository.

If you redistribute this dataset, carry these notices with it.

## Citation

For this dataset:

```bibtex
@misc{abdul_rahim_nizamani_2026,
	author       = { Abdul Rahim Nizamani },
	title        = { Sindhi-texts-big-dataset (Revision 2106ece) },
	year         = 2026,
	url          = { https://huggingface.co/datasets/arnizamani/Sindhi-texts-big-dataset },
	doi          = { 10.57967/hf/9789 },
	publisher    = { Hugging Face },
	note         = { Version 2.0 }
}
```

Please also cite the upstream corpora this dataset incorporates. Their BibTeX entries are
deliberately not reproduced here — copy them from the sources below:

- **FineWeb2** — Penedo et al., *FineWeb2: One Pipeline to Scale Them All — Adapting
  Pre-Training Data Processing to Every Language*, 2025, arXiv:2506.20920,
  <https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20920>.
- **CC100** — Conneau et al., *Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale*,
  ACL 2020, pp. 8440–8451, <https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.747>. CC100 also asks that
  CCNet be cited: Wenzek et al., *CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web
  Crawl Data*, LREC 2020, <https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.494/>.

The dictionary is a published work and is best cited directly: N. A. Baloch,
*A Comprehensive Dictionary of Classical & Current Sindhi* (Jamé Sindhi Lughat), Sindhi
Language Authority, first revised edition, 2004.