Hi everyone,

I’m a native speaker of Shawiya (Tacawit - ISO shy ), an Amazigh language spoken in Algeria. Online, this language is practically non-existent—there is almost zero digital text or parallel corpora available to scrape.

Because the data simply doesn't exist on the web, I have direct access to offline sources : physical books, un-digitized manuscripts, historical folktales, and real-world native speech that have never touched the internet. I’m considering digitizing, transcribing, and translating these into a clean parallel dataset (Shawiya <-> English/French/Arabic), as well as creating original native text from scratch.

We always hear that AI companies have "hit the data wall" and are desperate for non-web, un-scrapable human data. However, realistically, Shawiya is a niche language with very low commercial ROI.…