At least once a week these days, someone tags me on a post on Facebook, or on a tweet, asking for the meaning of a Yorùbá word. Often, it will be a word I know and I can help explain. In other times, it would be a word of whose meaning I’m not sure, or of whose meaning I’d been searching myself for a while. In the latter cases, I re-share the query to my friends, colleagues, and social media acquaintances, and in a few hours, we are usually able to find the meaning. It is usually an experience that leaves me more educated or enlightened than I previously was.
Over the last couple of years, as my reputation grew online as someone, even if mildly, competent in Yorùbá language, culture, and lexicography, so has the frequency of these interactions all around social media, with friends, and often times with random strangers confident that my knowledge would be enough to save the day or point them in the right direction. It’s not a totally misplaced confidence (since, even when I’m ignorant, I have sufficient background and connection to find what they’re looking for, or direct them to the right place), but it had also eaten into my own personal space and time.
And so, a few years ago, after we launched YorubaName.com as a first multimedia dictionary of names, the idea of another multimedia dictionary of Yorùbá language began to weigh in my mind. It was disturbing that there was no reliable place online where one could find the meaning of Yorùbá words. There are printed dictionaries with varying competence, scattered websites, and projects all around the web for sure, but none of them was comprehensive, free, easily accessible, and with a multimedia component. This last part has turned out to be very important in helping those who use YorubaName.com figure out how the names are pronounced – especially for foreigners encountering them for the first time. It is also a part that published books are unable to replicate.
However, even more interestingly for me, a student of language in general, I began to be disturbed by the absence of a Yorùbá-Yorùbá dictionary anywhere at all. All the Yorùbá dictionaries I had seen or bought or used since I’d been interested in the subject were bilingual, such that one could call them translation dictionaries. They are good to have if the aim was for users to translate their thoughts into English or meant only for users who spoke English alone and merely wanted to know the meaning of a Yorùbá word they’d come across, but not for much else. This is not an exclusively Yorùbá problem, I should point out. Everywhere the word “Yorùbá” is used in this essay, one could easily replace it with “Igbo” or “Hausa” or “Fulfude” or “Esan” and it would still be relevant, sometimes even in a worse way for some of these languages.
And so, we have decided to expand into a more ambitious lexicography project: a fully multimedia dictionary of Yorùbá that is free, open, accessible, comprehensive, and – importantly – monolingual. What this means is that while the definition of the words will have English translations/interpretations present (I guess that makes it monolingual-bilingual dictionary), it won’t be its primary feature. Users will be able to use the dictionary to understand what Yorùbá words mean in a different language (English/French/German/etc), but its focus will be in defining words in Yorùbá for speakers (and learners) of the language. Thus, instead of a traditionally Yorùbá-English dictionary, this will be a Yorùbá-Yorùbá-English (where English can be expanded to French/German/Portuguese etc later). It will also be multimedia, with a chance to embed photographs, audios, and videos.
There are many reasons for this focus on Yorùbá-Yorùbá first. First, we have always believed that development comes from innovation and that innovation cannot happen when one cannot think properly in their mother tongue. So empowering a Nigerian language, starting with Yorùbá, for which we have a volunteer team on the ground, to properly cope with the 21st-century reality is the first step in this direction. Some state governments around Nigeria (like Lagos) are already empowering their educational sectors to use local languages as a medium of instruction. This is a good thing. Creating more tools that are universally available and accessible to everyone with an internet connection will complement these new efforts and empower speakers of these languages to better understand their language and innovate with it. Think of an Igbo dictionary with Igbo definitions. Same for Edo or Berom or Ibani. Having these tools available online will also help these languages better interact with technology – a problem that has plagued many African languages since the invention of the world wide web.
And so, let me introduce you to our new project at www.YorubaWord.com and www.OroYoruba.com.
This will be the first of its kind that is crowdsourced, multimedia, and free to use. The crowdsourcing element, just like for YorubaName.com, will ensure that users are also part of the data-gathering team and our first feedback mechanism. New words will be added by users searching for them as well as by the in-house lexicographers and our collaborative researchers. Along with the aid of other resources from published materials and archives from over many decades of scholarship, we hope that this becomes the primary place for learning about Yorùbá words. The element of English incorporated as a complementary feature will also help this work function as a translation dictionary for those who might need it.
As with our earlier projects, there will also be sister projects with other Nigerian languages as soon as we find volunteer lexicographers and other kinds of support to bring them to life. For this, we have also bought IgboWord.com, HausaWord.com, and a few others. Earlier this year, we got an $8000 endowment from a Nigerian couple towards the Yorùbá aspect of this effort, which is why it is the first language to take off. We are still seeking other collaborations.
Our work at YorubaName has always been an intervention in the cultural space as a way to open up an underrated industry of African language technology and empower cultural enthusiasts, developers, scholars, and others, to document local knowledge in technologically accessible formats and empower us to better fit in the modern age. This was why we created a text-to-speech project in November 2017 at www.ttsYoruba.com and to help to pronounce the names in the Names Dictionary. It is why we released a free tonemarking software for Igbo and Yorùbá, and it is also why we are currently working to create artificial speech recognition solutions for Nigerian languages. It is why we are supporting efforts to create IgboName.com as a sister site to YorubaName.com. It is why we will continue to explore opportunities, in business, civil society, education, technology, and others, to empower our languages and cultures, and help them thrive in this century and into the next.
We continue to rely on your support. You can continue to reach us at project@yorubaname.com or donate to the project using this paypal link. Meanwhile, you can follow the new project at www.YorubaWord.com and at http://www.twitter.com/YorubaWord. New volunteers are welcome too.