Yoruba language
Yoruba is a Niger-Congo language that is spoken in West Africa, primarily in South West Nigeria, Benin, and parts of Togo. It is spoken by the Yoruba people. Yoruba speakers number roughly 50 million, including around 2 million second-language or L2 speakers. As a pluricentric language, it is primarily spoken in a dialectal area spanning Nigeria, Benin, and Togo with smaller migrated communities in Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia.
Yoruba vocabulary is also used in African diaspora religions such as the Afro-Brazilian religions of Candomblé and Umbanda, the Caribbean religion of Santería in the form of the liturgical Lucumí language, and various Afro-American religions of North America. Among modern practitioners of these religions in the Americas, Yoruba is a liturgical language, as most of them are not fluent in it, yet they still use Yoruba words and phrases for songs or chants, which are rooted in cultural traditions. For such practitioners, the Yoruba lexicon is especially common for ritual purposes, and these modern manifestations have taken new forms that do not depend on vernacular fluency.
As the principal Yoruboid language, Yoruba is most closely related to Itsekiri and Igala.
History
Yoruba is classified among the Edekiri languages, which together with Itsekiri and the isolate Igala form the Yoruboid group of languages within the Volta–Niger branch of the Niger–Congo family.The linguistic unity of the Niger–Congo family dates to deep pre-history, with estimates ranging around 11,000 years ago. In present-day Nigeria, it is estimated that there are around 50 million Yoruba primary and secondary language speakers, as well as several other millions of speakers outside Nigeria, making it the most widely spoken African language outside of the continent. There is a substantial body of literature in the Yoruba language, including books, newspapers, and pamphlets. Yoruba is used in radio and television broadcasting and is taught at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. Historically, Yoruba was spoken by many slaves trafficked to the Americas, particularly Latin America, during the latter period of the Atlantic slave trade.
Varieties
The Yoruba dialect continuum consists of multiple dialects. The various Yoruba dialects in Yorubaland can be classified into five major dialect areas: Northwest, Northeast, Central, Southwest, and Southeast. Clear boundaries cannot be drawn, but peripheral areas of dialectal regions often have some similarities to adjoining dialects.North-West Yoruba (NWY)
North-West Yoruba was historically spoken in the Ọyọ Empire. In NWY dialects, Proto-Yoruba velar fricative and labialized voiced velar /gʷ/ have merged into /w/; the upper vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ were raised and merged with /i/ and /u/, just as their nasal counterparts, resulting in a vowel system with seven oral and three nasal vowels.NWY dialects cover the following varieties, peoples, and places: Egba, Ibadan, Ọyọ, Lagos, Onko, and Ibarapa. Samples:
Central Yoruba
Central Yoruba forms a transitional area in that the lexicon has much in common with NWY and shares many ethnographical features with SEY. Its vowel system is the most traditional of the three dialect groups, retaining nine oral-vowel contrasts, six or seven nasal vowels, and an extensive vowel harmony system. Peculiar to Central and Eastern Yoruba also is the ability to begin words with the vowel , which in Western Yoruba has been changed to .Central Yoruba dialects cover the following varieties, peoples, and places: Igbomina, Ijesha, Ifẹ, Ekiti, Ẹfọn, and Western Akoko. Samples:
South-East Yoruba (SEY)
South-East Yoruba was most likely associated with the expansion of the Great Benin Empire after. In contrast to NWY, lineage, and descent are largely multilineal and cognatic, and the division of titles into war and civil is unknown. Linguistically, SEY has retained the /ɣ/ and /gw/ contrast, while it has lowered the nasal vowels /ĩ/ and /ʊ̃/ to /ɛ̃/ and /ɔ̃/, respectively. SEY has collapsed the second and third-person plural pronominal forms; thus, àn án wá can mean either 'you came' or 'they came' in SEY dialects, whereas NWY for example has ẹ wá 'you came' and wọ́n wá 'they came', respectively. The emergence of a plural of respect may have prevented the coalescence of the two in NWY dialects.SEY dialects cover the following dialects, places, and peoples: Ondo, Ọwọ, Remo, Ijẹbu, Ikale, Eastern Akoko, Ilaje, and Usẹn. Samples:
Others
North-East Yoruba includes varieties of Yoruba that cover the following languages, peoples, and places: Yagba, Owe, Ikiri, Ijumu, Oworo, Gbede, Abunu, Okun. South-West Yoruba cover the following languages, peoples, and places: Ketu, Awori, Sakété, Ifè, Idasha, and Anago.Literary Yoruba
Literary Yoruba, also known as Standard Yoruba, Yoruba koiné, and common Yoruba, is a separate member of the dialect cluster. It is the written form of the language, the standard variety learned at school, and that is spoken by newsreaders on the radio. Standard Yoruba has its origin in the 1850s, when Samuel A. Crowther, the first native African Anglican bishop, published a Yoruba grammar and started his translation of the Bible. Though for a large part based on the Ọyọ and Ibadan dialects, Standard Yoruba incorporates several features from other dialects. It also has some features peculiar to itself, for example, the simplified vowel harmony system, as well as foreign structures, such as calques from English that originated in early translations of religious works.Because the use of Standard Yoruba did not result from some deliberate linguistic policy, much controversy exists as to what constitutes 'genuine Yoruba', with some writers holding the opinion that the Ọyọ dialect is the "pure" form, and others stating that there is no such thing as genuine Yoruba at all. Standard Yoruba, the variety learned at school and used in the media, has nonetheless been a decisive consolidating factor in the emergence of a common Yoruba identity.
Writing systems
The earliest evidence of the presence of Islam in Yorubaland goes back to the 14th century. The earliest documented history of the people, traced to the latter part of the 17th century, was in Yoruba but in the Arabic script called Ajami. This makes Yoruba one of the oldest African languages with an attested history of Ajami. However, the oldest extant Yoruba Ajami exemplar is a 19th-century Islamic verse by Badamasi Agbaji. There are several items of Yoruba Ajami in poetry, personal notes, and esoteric knowledge. Nevertheless, Yoruba Ajami remained idiosyncratic and not socially diffused, as no standardized orthography existed. The plethora of dialects and the absence of a central promotional institution, among others, are responsible.In the 17th century, Yoruba was written in the Ajami script, a form of Arabic script. It is still written in the Ajami writing script in some Islamic circles. Standard Yoruba orthography originated in the early work of Church Mission Society missionaries working among the Aku of Freetown. One of their informants was Crowther, who later would proceed to work on his native language himself. In early grammar primers and translations of portions of the English Bible, Crowther used the Latin alphabet largely without tone markings. The only diacritic used was a dot below certain vowels to signify their open variants and, viz. and. Over the years, the orthography was revised to represent tone, among other things. In 1875, the Church Missionary Society organized a conference on Yoruba Orthography; the standard devised there was the basis for the orthography of the steady flow of religious and educational literature over the next seventy years.
The current orthography of Yoruba derives from a 1966 report of the Yoruba Orthography Committee, along with Ayọ Bamgboṣe's 1965 Yoruba Orthography, a study of the earlier orthographies and an attempt to bring Yoruba orthography in line with actual speech as much as possible. Still similar to the older orthography, it employs the Latin alphabet modified by the use of the digraph and certain diacritics, including the underdots under the letters,, and. Previously, the vertical line had been used to avoid the mark being fully covered by an underline, as in ⟨e̩⟩, ⟨o̩⟩, ⟨s̩⟩; however, that usage is no longer common.
The Latin letters,,,, are not used as part of the official orthography of Standard Yoruba and only occur in loan words from English. However, is used in certain Yoruba dialects, like the Ao dialect.
The pronunciation of the letters without diacritics corresponds more or less to their International Phonetic Alphabet equivalents, except for the labial–velar consonant and , in which both consonants are pronounced simultaneously rather than sequentially. The diacritic underneath vowels indicates an open vowel, pronounced with the root of the tongue retracted. represents a postalveolar consonant like the English, represents a palatal approximant like English, and a voiced palatal stop, as is common in many African orthographies.
In addition to the underdots, three further diacritics are used on vowels and syllabic nasal consonants to indicate the language's tones: an acute accent for the high tone, a grave accent for the low tone, and an optional macron for the middle tone. These are used in addition to the underdots in and. When more than one tone is used in one syllable, the vowel can either be written once for each tone or, more rarely in current usage, combined into a single accent. In this case, a caron is used for the rising tone, and a circumflex for the falling tone.
In Benin, Yoruba uses a different orthography. The Yoruba alphabet was standardized along with other Benin languages in the National Languages Alphabet by the National Language Commission in 1975, and revised in 1990 and 2008 by the National Center for Applied Linguistics.
In 2011, a Beninese priest-chief by the name of Tolúlàṣẹ Ògúntósìn devised a new script for Yoruba, based on a vision received in his sleep which he believed to have been granted by Oduduwa. This Oduduwa script has also received support from other prominent chiefs in the Yorubaland region of both countries.