The Phonetic Map: How AI Speaks 193 Languages with Just 12 Voices

With 193 supported languages in our animated chatbot, understanding linguistic relationships has become essential. As AI improves in language ability, there's tremendous opportunity to benefit from deep linguistic knowledge. Here's a comprehensive guide to the languages we support and how they relate to each other phonetically.

193 Supported Languages

12 Native TTS Voices

20+ Language Families

~50 Tonal Languages

🎤 Languages with Native Voice Support

Our text-to-speech system provides native female voices for these 12 languages, which serve as the foundation for all voice output:

Language	Voice ID	Region/Variant
🇺🇸 English	en-female	United States
🇯🇵 Japanese	ja-female	Japan
🇩🇪 German	de-female	Germany
🇧🇷 Portuguese	pt-female	Brazil
🇪🇸 Spanish	es-female	Spain
🇫🇷 French	fr-female	France
🇨🇳 Chinese (Simplified)	zh-female	Mainland China
🇹🇼 Chinese (Traditional)	zh-tw-female	Taiwan
🇵🇭 Filipino (Tagalog)	tl-female	Philippines
🇮🇹 Italian	it-female	Italy
🇷🇺 Russian	ru-female	Russia
🇮🇳 Hindi	hi-female	India

🌳 Language Families & Phonetic Mapping

For the 181 languages without native voices, we use phonetic mapping to select the most natural-sounding fallback voice based on linguistic relationships.

🏝️ Austronesian Languages → Filipino Voice

These languages share vowel-heavy phonology, syllable-timed rhythm, and similar phonotactic patterns with Filipino.

Filipino/Tagalog Indonesian Malay Javanese Sundanese Cebuano Hiligaynon Ilocano Balinese Malagasy Hawaiian Samoan Maori Fijian

🏔️ Slavic & Post-Soviet Languages → Russian Voice

Shared Cyrillic heritage, similar consonant clusters, and palatalization patterns make Russian an ideal fallback.

Russian Ukrainian Belarusian Bulgarian Serbian Croatian Macedonian Kazakh Uzbek Kyrgyz Mongolian Tajik Georgian Armenian

🐉 Sino-Tibetan & Tonal SE Asian → Chinese Voice

These languages share tonal systems, monosyllabic tendencies, and similar prosodic patterns. Tonal

Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Cantonese Vietnamese Thai Lao Burmese Khmer Dzongkha Hmong

🕌 Indo-Aryan & South Asian → Hindi Voice

Shared retroflex consonants, aspirated stops, and similar vowel inventories across the Indian subcontinent.

Hindi Bengali Urdu Punjabi Gujarati Marathi Nepali Sinhala Tamil Telugu Kannada Malayalam Odia Sanskrit

💃 Romance Languages → Spanish/French/Italian/Portuguese

Descended from Latin, these languages share vowel systems, rhythm patterns, and similar phoneme inventories.

Spanish French Italian Portuguese Catalan → Spanish Galician → Spanish Romanian → Italian Occitan → French Sicilian → Italian Latin → Italian Haitian Creole → French

🏰 Germanic Languages → German/English

Continental Germanic languages map to German; North Germanic and Celtic languages map to English for prosodic similarity.

German English Dutch → German Afrikaans → German Yiddish → German Swedish → English Norwegian → English Danish → English Icelandic → English Welsh → English Irish → English

🎯 Special Phonetic Considerations

🎵 Tonal Languages: Languages like Thai, Vietnamese, and Cantonese use pitch to distinguish meaning. We map these to Chinese, which also uses tones, for more natural-sounding output.

🔤 Script Doesn't Equal Sound: Many languages share scripts but have very different phonologies. We prioritize phonetic similarity over writing system when choosing fallback voices.

Interesting Phonetic Relationships

Language	Maps To	Why?
Korean	Japanese	Similar vowel inventory (a, i, u, e, o), mora-timed rhythm, geographic proximity
Greek	Italian	Mediterranean phonetic features, similar vowel clarity
Polish, Czech, Slovak	German	Geographic proximity, shared consonant features despite being Slavic
Basque	Spanish	Language isolate, but centuries of contact with Spanish speakers
Finnish, Hungarian	English	Uralic languages with no close TTS voice available; English as neutral fallback
Quechua, Aymara	Spanish	Indigenous languages heavily influenced by Spanish colonization

🌍 Language Diversity Statistics

Here's a breakdown of the language families represented in our 193-language support:

Language Family	Count	Example Languages
Indo-European	~80	English, Hindi, Russian, Spanish, Greek, Persian
Sino-Tibetan	~10	Chinese, Burmese, Tibetan
Austronesian	~25	Indonesian, Filipino, Maori, Hawaiian
Afroasiatic	~15	Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa
Niger-Congo (Bantu)	~20	Swahili, Zulu, Yoruba, Igbo
Turkic	~10	Turkish, Kazakh, Uzbek, Azerbaijani
Uralic	~5	Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian
Dravidian	~4	Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam
Japonic	1	Japanese
Koreanic	1	Korean
Language Isolates	~5	Basque, Korean (sometimes classified)
Others	~17	Various smaller families

💡 Why Phonetic Mapping Matters

"The goal isn't perfect pronunciation—it's intelligible, natural-sounding speech. A Filipino voice speaking Indonesian sounds far more natural than an English voice attempting the same, even if neither is perfect."

When AI speaks a language without a native voice, the fallback voice determines:

• Vowel quality – How naturally vowels sound
• Rhythm and stress – Whether the speech feels natural or robotic
• Consonant approximation – How close unfamiliar sounds get to the target
• Overall intelligibility – Whether listeners can understand the output

By carefully mapping each language to its phonetically closest available voice, we ensure the best possible listening experience across all 193 supported languages.

🚀 Future Improvements

As TTS technology advances, we're looking forward to:

• Adding native voices for more languages (Arabic, Korean, and Turkish are top priorities)
• Improving phonetic mappings based on user feedback
• Supporting regional variants (e.g., Latin American Spanish vs. European Spanish)
• Better handling of code-switching and multilingual text

📝 Note: This system is designed for our Live2D animated chatbot. The voice mappings are optimized for conversational AI responses and may differ from traditional TTS applications.