On Saturday, March 10, 2018, YorubaName held its first Yorùbá language tonemarking workshop at Capital Square in Lekki, Lagos. It was a four-hour interactive class designed to demystify the Yorùbá tone in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and attendees were drawn from various sectors of society, from law to journalism to tech to economics. They each paid 5,000 naira to attend, although there were five free slots provided by the support we got from an anonymous donor as well as Capital Square, Lagos.

The idea to have such a class/workshop has been with us for a while, but it kicked into high gear this week when the suggestion on twitter was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. Tonemarking words/sentences in Yorùbá is one part of learning the language that most people have admitted having problems with. Yorùbá is a tone language, like Mandarin, Vietnamese, and a number of other world languages that use pitch variation to change the meaning of words. Famous examples in Yorùbá are the words ọkọ́ (hoe), ọkọ (husband), ọkọ̀ (vehicle), ọ̀kọ̀ (spear), which mean different things depending on the tone marks placed on the vowels.

Because of a declining interest in local language education in Nigeria, and the pervasive attitude among Nigerian elites that teaching and learning in English alone was desirable as a means to success, teaching Yorùbá (or Igbo, Hausa, and other Nigerian languages) had suffered, and nowhere more seriously with regards to Yorùbá than in the teaching of tonemarking, which is a cornerstone of the language. Even in natural language processing, overcoming the tone is always one of the first challenges to conquer before anything can be done (which explains our focus on, and work with, TTSYorùbá a few months ago).

When I was growing up in Ìbàdàn and reading literature in Yorùbá, it was never a normal thing to see a text written in the language without appropriate tone marks. Sure, people sometimes made mistakes in writing, but the default state of things whenever the language was presented in text paid respect to the work of scholars who had created a writing orthography. Occasionally in public, one came across signboards with poorly-written texts showing the writer wasn’t a Yorùbá-literate person, but official documents written in the language at least tried to comply with the writing rules. It seemed though, over the years, that an unwritten consensus was reached that formal rules be left to literatures-in-Yorùbá alone and spared from other platforms. So, over time, we started seeing more texts everywhere (in newspapers, signboards, movies, etc) which weren’t tonemarked at all, and subject to ambiguous interpretation.

This book, published in 1980, has hand-inserted tonemarking on the cover.

The result of this is a pernicious culture of nonchalance that eventually returned to consume the Yorùbá literary industry itself, but not before destroying African literature in general and messing up the work of the older generation of scholars who bequeathed the heritage in the first place. Today, not many books are published in the language. Those that are, needed a lot of resources to publish because software manufacturers haven’t created enough tools to write Yorùbá tones, so publishers are reluctant to make the effort to secure them. Eventually, the industry collapsed.  In the past, even when the relevant typefaces weren’t available to render tonemarked Yorùbá vowels, postproduction efforts were put in place to ensure that the books still properly rendered the language (see attached image). But over time, that willingness waned and took with it a chance for an industry to pressure technological corporations to create the tools needed for writing. It took the recent effort of our team, in 2015, by creating a free downloadable tonemarking software, to empower a new generation of writers intent on writing the language correctly.

But the problem doesn’t only affect the Yorùbá literary industry. As I’ve mentioned in previous places, sometimes while reviewing Nigerian literature in English, it is a shame to see a Yorùbá writer in English go to long lengths to cater to the writing systems of other languages whose words are used in his/her work but totally ignore it deals with Yorùbá.

I once asked Wọlé Ṣóyínká (Africa’s first Nobel Laureate) in person what, in his opinion, was the reason why writers-in-English of his generation didn’t care to properly tonemark Yorùbá words/names in their work. He didn’t have an answer. Instead, he asked me to read the preface to his latest play Alápatà Àpáta which, in truth, dealt with the subject in considerable detail, focusing on the playwright’s own angst at watching Yorùbá and non-Yorùbá actors mangle the pronunciation of simple Yorùbá names when they could pronounce even more complex European ones. But he never successfully defended why, over the years, none of his own earlier plays, published by the big and established publishers, had been consistent with the tone marking of character names and their lines. What I wanted to know was whether this was at the insistence of these publishers (many of which were led by either foreigners or Nigerians who were trained abroad) who wanted conformity with British standards or usually ignoring anything that didn’t feel English, or whether it was a result of nonchalance by the writers themselves, for not insisting (as some modern writers have – see Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, etc) that this be done.

A couple of weeks ago, the Lagos State Government passed a law making it compulsory to learn Yorùbá in its schools. It was a brave step in the right direction and a return to focus on local language education as an equally important part of child upbringing. But years of neglect has decimated the teacher population for this language, many of whom have switched to other subjects. So, now that a demand exists, we are taking it upon ourselves to help train new people in filling the gap.

But these series of classes aren’t directed as intending teachers alone. Individuals around the country, first-time learners of Yorùbá, expats living in Lagos and are interested in learning the skill, tech professionals and other types of professionals interested in the language, will all benefit. Our aim is to ensure that the skill of tonemarking is restored to its pride of place in the learning and speaking of Yorùbá. No one can claim to be a good writer/reader of the language without being able to successfully tell the difference between Adésọ́lá and Adéṣọlá. No longer should we have to read ambiguous road signs because the writer couldn’t go through the pains of learning to write properly in the target language. By providing training opportunities of this nature for willing participants across the state and beyond, we hope to rejuvenate the language, provide educational opportunities for willing learners, and restore writing and reading in Yorùbá to a good place in this society.

A second workshop has been planned for April 6, 2018. It will hold at (and is supported by) Civic Hive, Yaba, Lagos. This one is free and open to all and you can register here. With sponsorship and support, we might be able to make this a regular monthly workshop for all interested participants at an affordable price – or for free. An online class is also being planned going forward. (So, if you would like to support us, send an email to us at project@yorubaname.com). We are glad for this opportunity to help educate the public and revitalize a language, but more importantly, we are excited that an appetite exists for this kind of intervention.