At Goobo Labs, we've spent years building the infrastructure required to bring the Somali language into the modern era of AI. Through our work on SomNLP Corpus v2, the Soplang programming language, and our morphological tokenizers, we've encountered one recurring, fundamental bottleneck: inconsistency.
In the world of NLP, inconsistency is the enemy of performance. Somali language datasets are riddled with conflicting spelling conventions, varying loanword adaptations, and erratic punctuation usage. Without a centralized, machine-readable source of truth for Somali orthography and grammar, every tech company, AI researcher, and linguist has had to guess — or invent their own rules.
What is the Somali Language Standard (SLS)?
The SLS is designed to act as the W3C or IETF for the Somali language. It is a strictly governed, open-source framework that centralizes the rules of the language — from the basic alphabet to complex grammar and machine-learning terminology.
Crucially, SLS is not a static PDF. It is a machine-readable, CI/CD-validated repository. Every standard is tracked via a JSON registry, follows a strict lifecycle (Draft → Proposed → Review → Candidate → Stable), and traces normative requirements (MUST, SHOULD) to compliance checklists. This allows developers to programmatically verify whether their datasets and tokenizers are "SLS-Compliant."
Completing Phase 1: The Bedrock
You cannot build a dictionary or an LLM instruction dataset if your systems cannot agree on what constitutes a "letter." Phase 1 was entirely focused on building the constitutional framework and locking in the alphabet. We have officially published our first two standards into the Proposed state.
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Standards published
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