Welcome to Faker’s documentation!

faker2

CI Coverage PyPI version Supported Python versions License: MIT

faker2 is a fork of joke2k/Faker — the reference Python library for generating fake data — extended for one specific job: pseudonymizing personally identifiable information (PII) in speech and text datasets, in every language a speech model transcribes.

Install it alongside upstream Faker if you want — the import name is faker2, so both can coexist:

pip install faker2

from faker2 import Faker
Faker("ml_IN").name()   # ശ്രീദേവി വാസുദേവൻ

The upstream project’s own README is kept, unmodified, as README.upstream.rst.

Why this fork exists

We build multilingual ASR and PII-redaction models at Gladia. Training data must be pseudonymized: every real person and company name is replaced by a plausible surrogate, in the same language and script as the source text. Upstream Faker is excellent, but it was not designed for that use case, and three gaps blocked us:

  1. Missing languages. Whisper transcribes 100 languages; upstream Faker ships a person provider for only 56 of them. A Malayalam or Amharic transcript had no locale to draw surrogates from, so names either leaked through or were replaced by Latin-script placeholders — both unacceptable.

  2. Name pools too small for dataset scale. Pseudonymizing a corpus draws tens of thousands of surrogates. ja_JP ships 51 given names: 223 Japanese person entities could only yield 50 distinct surrogates, so the same fake name recurred dozens of times. A NER model trained on that data memorizes the surrogate list instead of learning the pattern — the dataset teaches the wrong thing.

  3. Company names collapsing. Several locales had two or three company suffixes and a single format, so a few hundred draws produced barely a hundred distinct companies — the same memorization problem, for organizations.

None of this is a criticism of upstream: generating a handful of fake records for a test fixture — Faker’s core use case — has entirely different requirements from generating a hundred thousand surrogates that a neural network will then train on.

What this fork adds

48 new locales — person + company providers with authentic native-script data, bringing coverage to all 100 Whisper languages:

af_ZA am_ET as_IN ba_RU be_BY bo_CN br_FR bs_BA cy_GB eu_ES fo_FO gl_ES haw_US ht_HT jw_ID kk_KZ km_KH kn_IN la lb_LU ln_CD lo_LA mg_MG mi_NZ ml_IN mn_MN ms_MY mt_MT my_MM oc_FR pa_IN ps_AF sa_IN sd_PK si_LK sn_ZW so_SO sq_AL sr_RS su_ID te_IN tg_TJ tk_TM tl_PH tt_RU ur_PK yi_DE yue_HK

Larger given-name pools where upstream’s were too small for dataset-scale pseudonymization: ja_JP 51 → 160, ko_KR 121 → 186, pl_PL 153 → 205, plus 120+ entries per list across the new locales.

Diversity-hardened company providers: a sector component was added to eight locales whose output space was collapsing, lifting unique-company ratios from 65–79 % to 94–97 % over 300 draws.

Tests that check what matters for this use case — 288 of them, on top of upstream’s suite (2 742 passing in total):

  • names are emitted in the expected script (a Malayalam locale must not produce Latin names);

  • pool sizes stay above the memorization threshold;

  • ≥ 85 % unique full names over 400 seeded draws, ≥ 70 % unique companies;

  • ja_JP kana/romaji completeness;

  • every Whisper language resolves to a working locale.

Merged upstream pull requests that were open and unreleased — mostly IBAN/bank correctness fixes (uk_UA, ru_RU, no_NO, nl_BE, en_IE, pt_BR, da_DK, es_ES, en_IN/es_MX/zh_CN), the en_IN company / IFSC / license-plate providers, and a choices_distribution IndexError fix.

Relationship with upstream

  • All credit for Faker goes to joke2k and its contributors. This fork exists to add locales and scale properties — not to replace or compete with the original project. If you do not need the above, use upstream Faker: pip install Faker.

  • The fork tracks upstream master, keeps its MIT license and its architecture unchanged; new locales follow the project’s exact provider conventions.

  • Locale contributions made here are intended to be offered back upstream where they fit the project’s scope.

  • faker2 uses its own import name (faker2), so it can be installed side by side with upstream Faker in the same environment.

Usage

Identical to upstream — see the Faker documentation. The only difference is the set of available locales:

from faker2 import Faker

Faker("yue_HK").name()      # 陳嘉敏
Faker("sr_RS").name()       # Милена Чолић
Faker("am_ET").company()    # company name in Ge'ez script

Pseudonymization tip — seed per source item so the mapping is reproducible without storing any real→fake table:

import hashlib
from faker2 import Faker

def surrogate(original: str, text: str, locale: str) -> str:
    seed = int(hashlib.sha1(f"{text}\0{original}".encode()).hexdigest()[:12], 16)
    fake = Faker(locale)
    fake.seed_instance(seed)
    return fake.name()

License

MIT, unchanged from upstream. See LICENSE.txt.

Contents

Indices and tables