buchwandler

Lexphon

Lexphon is a generic, lexicon-driven phonemizer and CLI built on G2Lex. It consumes released pronunciation assets and returns normalized IPA without producing Kokoro phonemes.

Lexphon provides:

  • Ordered, layered lexicon lookup with language profiles and selectors.

  • Deterministic IPA and ARPABET normalization.

  • Structured token results with pronunciation and provenance metadata.

  • Explicit, optional eSpeak and Goruut pronunciation providers.

  • Offline runtime behavior after data has been provisioned.

See the README for the complete installation instructions, API reference, CLI examples, and data-source boundaries.

Install

python -m pip install lexphon

Install optional providers separately when needed:

python -m pip install "lexphon[espeak]"
python -m pip install "lexphon[goruut]"

The espeak extra installs espeakng-runtime and uses an available system eSpeak or eSpeak-NG runtime. Install lexphon[espeak-bundled] when the runtime’s bundled native loader is desired. Pygoruut may provision its own Goruut runtime.

Quick start

Provision a pronunciation asset before using profile defaults:

lexphon data install de-de:gold
lexphon phonemize --language de-DE "Die Leute kommen."

The Python API exposes both lexical evidence and staged pronunciation lookup:

from lexphon import Phonemizer

with Phonemizer(
    "de-DE",
    lexicons=["de-de:gold"],
    fallback=None,
) as engine:
    result = engine.phonemize_tokens("Die Leute")
    for token in result.tokens:
        print(token.text, token.pronunciation, token.source)

lookup_lexicon() searches only installed lexicons. lookup() searches lexicons first and invokes the configured provider only after a miss. Runtime commands do not download catalogs or lexicons implicitly.

Data lifecycle

Catalog access and downloads are explicit. DataStore.install() retrieves and verifies a manifest and asset, then activates the complete version atomically. list, info, verify, and remove inspect or manage local data without network access.

Data release versions and the Lexphon Python package version are independent. Pin both the Python dependency and the immutable data release used during provisioning.