The Indonesian Religiolect Corpus: Data Curation for Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic Language Varieties

Dan Sachs


Abstract
Religiolects—language varieties shaped by re- ligious community identity—are low-resource domains often overlooked within high-resource languages. We present the Indo-Religiolect Corpus, the first large-scale dataset for In- donesian religious language variation, con- taining 3 million sentences from over 100 institutional websites representing Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant communities. Fine- tuning IndoBERT demonstrates these religi- olects are computationally distinguishable: Is- lamic Indonesian exhibits high distinctiveness (91.73%), while Catholic and Protestant vari- eties share substantial lexical overlap yet retain detectable shibboleths (86.41% and 86.64%). Our findings indicate a potential for represen- tation collapse: models trained on majority- normative data may default to secular or Muslim-dominant Indonesian, blurring distinct minority voices. We hypothesize that these gaps plausibly translate into downstream fair- ness risks for applications like content mod- eration and automated hiring. This corpus of- fers a template for documenting sub-national varieties, advancing linguistic equity beyond “National Language” benchmarks toward “No Language Variety Left Behind.”
Anthology ID:
2026.loreslm-1.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Hansi Hettiarachchi, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Alistair Plum, Paul Rayson, Ruslan Mitkov, Mohamed Gaber, Damith Premasiri, Fiona Anting Tan, Lasitha Uyangodage
Venue:
LoResLM
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
426–435
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.36/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dan Sachs. 2026. The Indonesian Religiolect Corpus: Data Curation for Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic Language Varieties. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026), pages 426–435, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Indonesian Religiolect Corpus: Data Curation for Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic Language Varieties (Sachs, LoResLM 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.loreslm-1.36.pdf