Siamsil 🌄

The digital home for the Zomi language.

Zomi, also called Zolai or Tedim (ISO 639-3 ctd), is spoken by Zomi communities in Myanmar, India, and a growing worldwide diaspora. It has very few digital resources. Siamsil is a non-profit building open tools so Zomi speakers can learn, search, and translate in their own language, and so the language thrives in the age of AI.

What we work on

📖 Siamsil Dictionary: an English–Zomi dictionary of about 50,000 entries, being reviewed word by word by native Tedim speakers.
🔤 Zomi Standard Form: consistent Zolai spelling, built from community style guides, the Bible, and published Zomi writing.
🌐 Translation: English ⇄ Zomi models fine-tuned from NLLB-200. A model is released only when every source it learned from is properly licensed.
🎙️ Speech: consent-based recordings for future Zomi speech recognition and text-to-speech.

Our principles

Community first. Native speakers review and approve the language; nothing machine-made is presented as verified.
Respect for owners. Every source is credited, and used only as its rights holder allows.
Open where we can. Tools and permitted data are shared for the Zomi community and for low-resource language research.

Get involved

Tedim dialect speakers: help review the dictionary, a few hundred words at a time, at your own pace.
Researchers and developers: we welcome collaboration on low-resource translation and Zomi NLP.
Authors, publishers, and churches: share Zomi texts with permission, so your work helps keep the language alive.

Lungdam mahmah! 🙏