BASICALLY

Doing a smart man's job with a dumb man's brain.

But Anyways

The Hmar Heritage Foundation is a simple, non-profit digital stewardship effort dedicated to preserving the Hmar language, traditional literature, historical accounts, and cultural heritage online.

We are not a massive tech lab or a funded institution. We are simply doing the gradual, necessary work of digitizing physical books, building open dictionaries, compiling parallel Bibles, and archiving our language so it survives and thrives in the digital age.

There are a lot of smart people here on Hugging Face, so if you can spare the time, don't hesitate to join us, because we don't know what we are doing. The task is relatively simple: create datasets. But apparently, you still need some brain to create proper dataset structures.

What We Maintain Here

Under the Hmar Heritage Archival Project, we maintain open digital repositories for our community, researchers, and future generations:

• 📚 corpus-archive — Our core digital library and text vault containing digitized books, historical accounts, dictionaries, and parallel Bibles.
• 📖 wordlist — A standardized collection of 43,500+ Hmar words, definitions, and translations compiled from five lexicon sources.
• ✝️ zo-bible — A sentence-aligned parallel Bible corpus covering 8 Zo languages (cataloged as Kuki-Chin under Glottocode kuki1246 in legacy databases) and 10 translation versions.

Language Standards & Taxonomy Policy

Across all datasets hosted here, the Hmar Heritage Foundation formally adopts the indigenous autonym Zo for the language family node cataloged under Glottocode kuki1246 (labeled as "Kuki-Chin" in legacy registries), while advocating for the dissolution of the non-monophyletic macro-node "Kuki-Chin-Naga" (kuki1245).

While individual ISO 639-3 language codes (hmr, lus, pck, vky, tcz, gnb, zom) remain strictly preserved for full software and dataset compatibility, higher-level metadata tags have been updated to reflect community endonyms and modern comparative phonology. For the complete academic rationale on why we adopt Zo over colonial exonyms, read our official Language Standards & Classification Policy.

License & Spirit

Everything we build is open for research, community education, and building tools for our language.

• Maintained by: Hmar Heritage Foundation
• Official Policy: Language Standards & Policy
• GitHub: github.com/hmar-heritage-org