This paper presents the design, collection and verification of a bilingual text-to-speech synthesis corpus for Welsh and English. The ever expanding voice collection currently contains almost 10 hours of recordings from a bilingual, phonetically balanced text corpus. The speakers consist of a professional voice actor and three amateur contributors, with male and female accents from north and south Wales. This corpus provides audio-text pairs for building and training high-quality bilingual Welsh-English neural based TTS systems. We describe the process by which we created a phonetically balanced prompt set and the challenges of attempting to collate such a dataset during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our initial findings in validating the corpus via the implementation of a state-of-the-art TTS models are presented. This corpus represents the first open-source Welsh language corpus large enough to capitalise on neural TTS architectures.

Cornish and Welsh are closely related Celtic languages and this paper provides a brief description of a recent project to publish an online bilingual English/Cornish dictionary, the Gerlyver Kernewek, based on similar work previously undertaken for Welsh. Both languages are endangered, Cornish critically so, but both can benefit from the use of language technology. Welsh has previous experience of using language technologies for language revitalization, and this is now being used to help the Cornish language create new tools and resources, including lexicographical ones, helping a dispersed team of language specialists and editors, many of them in a voluntary capacity, to work collaboratively online. Details are given of the Maes T dictionary writing and publication platform, originally developed for Welsh, and of some of the adaptations that had to be made to accommodate the specific needs of Cornish, including their use of Middle and Late varieties due to its development as a revived language.

This paper describes the use of a free, on-line language spelling and grammar checking aid as a vehicle for the collection of a significant (31 million words and rising) corpus of text for academic research in the context of less resourced languages where such data in sufficient quantities are often unavailable. It describes two versions of the corpus: the texts as submitted, prior to the correction process, and the texts following the user’s incorporation of any suggested changes. An overview of the corpus’ contents is given and an analysis of use including usage statistics is also provided. Issues surrounding privacy and the anonymization of data are explored as is the data’s potential use for linguistic analysis, lexical research and language modelling. The method used for gathering this corpus is believed to be unique, and is a valuable addition to corpus studies in a minority language.