Google Trends is a tool that can be used to find out how often a particular term is searched for on Google, across various regions of the world, and in various languages. So, sometime last week, I decided to take it for a spin: I wanted to to have a feel of the search activities related to Yoruba language and specifically to “Yoruba names”.
Knowing that there are over 30 million Yoruba speakers in Nigeria, and that it is also spoken in parts of Togo, Republic of Benin, Brazil and Ghana, I was curious to see how these numbers of speakers reflect in search activities on Google. In this post, I will share with you some of the insights that were gleaned…yeah, thanks to Google.
Trends for search terms related to ‘Yoruba’
The strategy was not to only explore search activity for the specific search query “Yoruba Names” but also to take a look at the activity around related search-terms. To answer the question “What are the other common terms people search for, that relate to Yoruba names?”, I also took some general search terms into consideration, like the various exonyms and forms used to describe Yoruba language.
Google Trends also displays the search activities for terms that relate to the search term being explored, which makes it easier to have a more accurate feel of the other interest of the personae behind the searches.
Starting with the general term ‘Yoruba’, what are the search activities over time? Google Trends helps us answer this question, as seen in the graph below:
A search term makes it into this graph if the number of times it is searched for is 10% (or more) of the total number of search terms in a particular region. Looking at the graph above, we can see that the search frequency was mostly flat or slightly decreasing from 2005 to about 2011 from whence there has been a steady increase.
We may ask ourselves what could have been responsible for this change in trends? Increase in population? Increase in access to the Internet?
Regional data
Google Trends not only allows you to see the search volume trends over time, it can also display the breakdown of the search activities by country so as to determine which regions of the world contributed the most to the search term.
Not surprisingly, Nigeria tops the list, followed by Benin, Cuba, St. Helena, Côte d’Ivoire, Venezuela, Ghana, Panama, Bolivia and South Africa. This is an interesting piece of information to know, especially when building a service around the Yoruba language.
Related searches
Next, I explored the related searches that might help uncover orthogonal interests to the main search term. The data for this is presented below:
Related search terms to “Yoruba”
As shown in the table above, Movies, Language and Religion are the most searched for terms related to “Yoruba”.
The next step was an analysis of the search activity for the particular phrase “Yoruba Names”. For this phrase, I included the singular form “Yoruba Name” also. Here are the results:
The graph also shows there is an upward trend in search activities for “Yoruba Name/Names”.
Looking at how this is distributed over regions, we see;
Again, as expected, Nigeria is at the top, followed by the UK and the United States, countries which happen to be home to a lot of Nigerian expats/diasporas. Does having a high search activity for “Yoruba Name” from the these places mean that a lot of the Nigerian expats are still very much interested in giving their kids Yoruba names? It is possible, and even likely. It is also possible that some of the searches are as a result of academic or personal research endeavours.
Going another step ahead to examine the search activities of terms related to “Yoruba Name/Names” we see:
Most of the search activities around Yoruba names seem to be for finding names for newborn babies. It is also worth noting that searches looking for female names seem to be more frequent than searches for male names. It would be interesting to know if there is any conclusion to be drawn from this.
Exonyms or alternative names for ‘Yoruba’
I went on to look up the search activities around the different exonyms, the Yoruba language has. Being a language that is not only spoken in Nigeria but also in other countries in West Africa and the Caribbean, and having thus come in contact with other language groups, there are quite a number of forms by which the language is referred to.
The different forms I searched for acitivity on was: Yáríbà, Yórúbáwá, Nàgó Ànàgó, Lùkúmì, and Akú. And out of all these terms, the only one that has enough search traffic to make it into Google trends is Lukumi (apart from Nago and Anago which apparently means something else in Poland and Japan respectively)
The data for Lukumi showed that most of its search activity is from the United states and that searches are mostly related to religion, which can be explained by the fact that Lukumi is not only a dialect of Yoruba language spoken by the Afro-Cuban ethnic group of Yoruba ancestry, it is also the official language of the Santería religion.
Comparison to other languages
Finally, I decided to find out how the search activities for Yoruba compares to other languages of the world. The result of this follows:
Yoruba vs English
Yoruba vs French
Yoruba vs Chinese
It is clear that English, French and Chinese dwarf the Yoruba language in terms of search activity on Google, which was to expected, taking into consideration the history and the population size behind these other languages.
But what about languages with a number of speakers comparable to that of Yoruba?
Yoruba (spoken by approximately 30 million people) vs Dutch (spoken mostly in the Netherlands, a country of 16.8 million (2013))
Yoruba vs Norwegian (spoken in Norway a population of mostly 5.084 million (2013) people)
Yoruba vs Xhosa (spoken by approximately 7.6 million people in South Africa)
I guess we can then conclude that in order to have a greater search activity around a language, the size of the speaking population is not the determining factor, but what matters is rather how much that language is being used on the Internet.
Conclusions
Search activities around “Yoruba” either as a language or an ethnic group is showing a growing trend, although it can be argued, it should be doing better based on the number of speakers.
It can also be seen that most people searching for “Yoruba names” might be doing so to find names for their kids: perhaps the Yoruba name project should take this into the product development cycle and work on features that target parents and help them find names for their children?
We can also have a sense of the world regions where interest in Yoruba is highest.
Google Trends will continue to be part of the tools we use to gauge the trends around the Yoruba language and how it affects the Yoruba Name project. Feel free to play around with the tools yourself at www.google.com/trends, and if you stumble on any data you find interesting, do drop us a comment, we would be interested to know about it.