Category General | Yoruba Name

July 17, 2015 by Laila

Benin Travel Report #2: Bright Yellow Wave in Cotonou

I always find it very telling to hear about other people’s experiences of space, especially when they are travelling in a place where they can’t rely on the cues they are used to. Someone like me, who was used to maps and street names and generally to written signs indicating the location of things in the city, navigating Bangkok was a huge adjustment because I initially had no clue how to read Thai, nor did I know that most people in Thailand don’t orient themselves using maps.

Since then, I’ve noticed how what we pick out in our visual environment is trained by our interests but also by experiences such as getting lost in Bangkok and working out strategies for that not to happen too often.

Painting behind Fondation Zinsou, Cotonou

More than any landmark, this is what struck me the most on my first few days in Cotonou: the yellow wave of motorcycle taxis, the yellow of MTN-sponsored shops and ads, just yellow everywhere. In Cotonou, you hardly see any buses, minibuses, or any form of public transport other than shared green and yellow taxis. What you see a lot of, on the other hand, are motorcycle taxis donning the yellow sleeveless shirt indicating their registration number with the city council. Each city enforces their own regulations regarding this form of public transport and they have colour codes – blue in Porto Novo, green in Ouidah, purple and yellow in Bohicon – but nowhere is it as massively visible as in Cotonou, where competition for passengers is stiff.

Another observation that took a while longer to register but is no less impressive, is the contrast between the languages you hear on the streets and the signs and various written material present in the city. I can’t tell Fon from Gun or Minna but I definitely hear some French seamlessly woven into speech here and there, a bit of Nago (a dialect of Yorùbá) on a lucky day, and the occasional exchange in Nigerian Pidgin English. In all these daily conversations, French isn’t the most used language, unless a foreigner is involved.

But if you were to block your ears for a while and look only at the signs, you would be forgiven for quoting French, not Fon, as the city’s main lingua franca. I mentioned the wide dominance of French in the publishing sector, but it goes way beyond this aspect. Billboards, electoral campaign posters, shop signs, booklets about how to be a good wife: all these are in French, entirely. Of course, the language of instruction in Benin is French, and international brands probably produce advertising concepts that are only regionally localised, but what of local shopkeepers? Simply put, they learnt to write in French and wouldn’t think of using their own languages in writing, provided they knew how to.

In Porto Novo, I had a nice chat with a lady called Raoulat who owns a kitchenware store. We spoke for a few minutes in French, then in Yorùbá, and she helped me find my way to the Jardin des Plantes (botanical garden). She seemed so concerned about my well-being that I decided to send her a reassuring text once I got to my destination. A few minutes later, she called me back…to say she supposed I got there safely, but she was sorry she couldn’t read her mother tongue, Yorùbá. I was embarrassed not to have thought of that beforehand, and remembered how my own grandparents, who were native Breton speakers, never learnt to read or write it, but were literate in French, a language they had to acquire the hard way at school.

I started looking out for bilingual signs or at least traces of the languages I heard spoken in Benin. Porto Novo was different from Cotonou in this regard: Nigerian movies in Yorùbá are quite popular there, and there are entire shops full of DVDs with covers in Yorùbá or a mix of Yorùbá and English. The botanical garden, though currently in an alarming state of neglect, has multilingual labels indicating the plant species in Latin, Fon, Yoruba and French:

Multilingual board at the botanical garden, Porto Novo.

Guedevy Hotel in Abomey is famous for its wall decorations depicting the symbols of successive Danxome kings, but something else altogether caught my attention: a bilingual Fon / French reception sign! Granted, the font for ‘Agbaji’ is somewhat smaller than the French but still…

Bilingual reception sign at Guedevy Hotel, Abomey. Agbaji / Reception

So the trip continues!

Did you miss part 1? Head over here to read about Benin’s multilingual youth.

July 10, 2015 by Laila

Benin Travel Report #1 : Language Obsession

After a little over three weeks in the country of Benin, I decided it was time to share some of my obsessive thoughts on language, literature and…just generally people I talk to on a daily basis.

Jardin des Plantes, Porto Novo

Never multilingual enough

Most Beninois I’ve met are fluent in at least 3 languages – usually including Fon and French, but combinations vary – while some are able to communicate in an impressive number of languages spoken in the region. Multilingualism is definitely the norm and younger generations are now going one step further to embrace English and Mandarin Chinese as foreign languages.

And it’s not just talk: parents are ready to spend their hard-earned CFA Francs on sending their children to Ghana during the school holidays for them to improve their English in a conducive learning environment. There are summer language schools popping up on every block, bilingual English/French schools, and kids randomly greeting me in English on the street. From what I’ve been able to observe in Cotonou, learning English is very popular as the language is seen as a key to unlock study and job opportunities around the world.

Another upcoming trend is the study of Mandarin Chinese, both at university and at language centers such as the Confucius Institute. There is a lot of interest in Mandarin from young people who are looking to bag scholarships to China but are also keenly aware of the rise of Chinese businesses on the continent, and investing in the language as a way of keeping ahead in a competitive job market.

My impression is that young people’s attitude towards foreign language learning is positive, since these popular languages are meant to increase their chances of achieving a desirable lifestyle, but also incredibly confident and driven. While practically every single person I’ve told that I am learning Yorùbá has asked me if I found it difficult and seemed a bit incredulous, I don’t hear language learners saying English or Chinese are a big challenge to them. They just go for it!

On the situation of indigenous languages

When I look back at the past 3 weeks I’ve spent here, meeting quite a few professionals and academics involved in language-related fields such as linguistics, language instruction, indigenous language promotion, it is striking to realise that for the most part, they are forced to either create their own learning materials at great expense to themselves and/or their institutions, or rely on books imported from Nigeria. Based on my contacts’ assessment and my own short experience in the country, publishing in indigenous languages in Benin is virtually non-existent.

However, Yorùbá language and literature are taught at undergraduate levels at Université Abomey-Calavi and the numbers are very encouraging: every year, over 400 linguistics major are enrolled in the Yorùbá elective at various levels. Some of them may even be poets in the making for all we know! With enough support from teachers and publishing industry players, literature from Benin could in future become a better reflection of the linguistic landscape of the country. Already, Dr Adjẹran has a poetry collection in Yorùbá coming out very soon and his colleague at Université Abomey-Calavi, Pr Ige Mamoud, is working on a monolingual Yorùbá dictionary as well as Yorùbá learning materials for Benin.

That’s not all there is to Benin…

I’ve been dwelling mostly on Yorùbá language and literature in this first report because this is where my current interests lie but from my wanderings in the streets of Cotonou, Porto Novo and Ouidah, I took away some other peculiar stories and observations.

For instance, did you know that TVs are absolutely everywhere, even the smallest neighbourhood kiosk, but almost nobody here watches Benin TV channels? Or that motorcycle taxis wear different uniform colours depending on the city where they operate?

I will talk about this in my next post, coming up later in the week. But for now, back to work.

July 7, 2015 by Kola Tubosun

Teaching Yoruba in Nigeria

A couple of days ago, I came across this otherwise exhilarating piece of news. For the umpteenth time, a body of lawmakers in Nigeria have passed a law to teach local languages in secondary schools in the state of Lagos. Good news, yay… sort of!

I teach English language in a high school in Lagos, Nigeria, and I’ve complained for a while about the removal of languages from the syllabus of schools in response to a federal mandate. I have also taught Yoruba abroad at the university level, so I know and appreciate the enthusiastic response of other people far away to these languages that we had held in so much disrespect. So, from afar, this looks like a timely intervention in a negative trend that has kept Nigerian languages in the back burner while foreign languages (like French, German, Spanish) have enjoyed tremendous prominence and priority in our educational institutions.

An “urging” isn’t what it takes

From up close however, the piece of news is not only late, it is empty. Rather than actually demand that syllabi be changed across the state to make the local language compulsory, and funds made available to make this a reality, the news reports that the legislative body only “urged that the language should be introduced in both public and private primary schools in the state.” To most people who care about the matter, an “urging” certainly is the least expected outcome.

For over a year now, a federal mandate from the Ministry of Education has ensured that most secondary schools around the country remove the local language element from the syllabus in order to accommodate new compulsory subjects (like Computer, and Civic Education). Though not particularly problematic as subjects themselves, since at least one of them is important in today’s global learning environment, the mandate has ignored the terrible unintended consequence: teaching local languages has now become an optional expense which most secondary schools have become comfortable enough to avoid, satisfied with meeting the criteria of any other nine WAEC subjects. For a typical student, this includes Math, English, Civics, Computer, Economics, and four other elective subjects that are NOT Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa, or even History.

“I don’t speak my dialect”, they proudly say

What this has meant for interested observers is the sad reality that the most formative years of a Nigerian child’s life today are spent learning everything but the most important information about his/her history, language, or culture; and doing this in English, a global language that not only helps in ensuring the eventual extinction of our own medium of thought, but that has not accepted us enough as authentic or, if you will, native speakers capable of generating norms in the language. (Hint: it will probably never happen).

What this future portends is bleak: a generation bred in a comatose vat of a tepid growth in either direction of thought or language competence. When a fourteen year-old responds to an inquiry on his language use, with pride, as “I don’t speak my dialect” when he actually means “I don’t speak my language”, what is problematic there is way beyond just a mere issue of language loss, even though that’s what jumps out at first. This child has mastered not only the apathy of his immediate environment, but he has mastered it with an ignorance that equates “dialect” with “language”.

When you ask “Why don’t you speak your language?” one of the more common responses point to either the absence of a speaking parent, the lack of encouragement by society, the total disillusionment about the need, usefulness, or value of such a skill at all in today’s “global” world, or a personal apathy: “I don’t think it’s important. It doesn’t matter. Everyone speaks English anyway, and I intend to travel abroad soon for my college education. Why would I need Igbo/Hausa/Yoruba then?” I’ve often followed up my question with another one: “You do realise that Britain/America have people who already speak English as a first language, who would never be any more impressed by your use of it as they are of anyone else from Jamaica or Ghana. Is there anything else you bring to the table other than this language that – as you said – is already spoken by everyone else in the world?” Also: “Do you realise that you’d never be competent enough as to be referred to as a native speaker of English, no matter how hard you try?” Even more: “Have you prepared for your TOEFL exam yet? Do you know why you have to write it?” And this: “Do you know how much these countries spend every year to have their own citizens learn these languages that you have treated with apathy?”

Penalised for speaking “vernacular”

This apathy was not manufactured by the children. This “problem” being “solved” by a body of elected officials is also not a new one. Way back in the eighties, we were penalised in school for speaking what our Ghanaian teachers – employed particularly because of our parents’ preference for their English accents – called the “vernacular”. Today, colleagues of mine in a high school will frown at conversations between teachers conducted in any other Nigerian language, yet have no problems with ones done in French, or Spanish. I thought back to my primary school days in the hands of the Ghanaian teachers and found no resistance, among the school authority heads, for the Twi conversations among those same teachers, and for all the times we were called kwasia (as my memory remembers it) for some class behaviour. The fact is that over time, we have sold ourselves to the idea that a foreign language is superior to ours, and that we need it to survive in the world, even if our own languages die out of disuse. Most secondary schools in the country that dropped Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, etc from their syllabi in response to the federal mandate, have not dropped French, and when asked will probably see no problem whatsoever in that behaviour.

I am happy for the new rule (or “urging”) by the Lagos State legislators, and hope that similar and more enforceable rules spring up in other states in the country, backed by state resources, to keep our languages alive. However, the biggest effort to stem the erosion of our indigenous language future will come from the home, and from our minds. As the musician rightly said, “None but ourselves can free our minds.” The question is: do we know how bound it currently is?

Meanwhile, FG is sending Nigerian teachers to teach Yoruba in Brazil.

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June 15, 2015 by Kola Tubosun

How Many People Speak Yorùbá?

As simple as this question seems, if you ask Google, you will certainly come up with a number of different results.

According to this article on the website of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Yorùbá is spoken by over 20 million people in Nigeria alone. That quote will make sense only when we see that on Ethnologue.com, the go-to place for information about world languages, Yorùbá is said to have just over 19 million speakers.

From Ethnologue.com

But how can this be true? The Ethnologue.com website claims that its figures come from a 1993 publication by Johnstone, so maybe that makes sense for 1993. It is highly unlikely for a nation of people – in the absence of war or any other natural disaster/pestilence – to retain the same population figures for twenty-two years! What it means is that the figures quoted by SOAS and Ethnologue are outdated. So, why do we still quote them? And, importantly, what are the real figures? How many speak it in Nigeria as a first language? How many speak it as a second language? And how many speak it in other African countries (Benin, Ghana, Togo etc), and in the diaspora (Brazil, Cuba, United States, Jamaica, etc)?

I sent an email, this morning, to Ethnologue.com to seek clarification on the source of their figures. The response I got this evening from Mr. Chuck Fennig, admits that current figures on this matter are unreliable because of the absence of “accurate assessment”. The World Factbook, he says, “puts the Yorùbá ethnic group at 21% of the total population, which would mean approximately 37 million people, but that would be an Ethnic Population, not a Language Population. It is very difficult to find the percentage of the ethnic group that speaks the language as their mother tongue. Presumably, that percentage would be 80% or more.” I’ve screenshot his more succinct response below.

From Wikipedia’s profile on Yorùbá

Wikipedia gets its own quote from more recent (2007, 2010) publications, and puts the population of the language speakers at 30 million speakers. This is also unsatisfactory. We don’t know where the figure comes from, what its breakdown is by L1 (those who speak it as a first language, a.k.a native speakers) and L2 (everyone else, i.e. non-native speakers, who may be outside the African continent).

The Source of the Problem

The country Nigeria has had a census of its citizens about every ten years from around 1863, and the recorded population trends from there into recent times should normally give us some relevant information. However, figures in Nigerian population census have become politicised and thus not altogether reliable. More importantly, and most sadly, past populations census questionnaires omitted questions about ethnicity (and religion) in deference to politicians in the northern part of the country who have used fear tactics and other bullish manoeuvres to successfully mobilise against this provision, for a number of years. (Read more here).

Hence, all we know about the 1991 census is that the population of the country is 88.9 million. It is from this figure, presumably, that Johnstone (1993) estimates that the Yorùbá language speakers amount to 18.9 million – about 21% of the country’s population (going by Mr. Fennig’s calculation). I haven’t read Johnstone. If anyone has access to the publication, please point me towards it.

The equally controversial (and last) census in the country, which was held in 2006, put the country’s population at 140 million but also refused to account for the number of each ethnic group. If we apply the 21% rule to this, we come up with 29.4 million people, similar to the 30 million figure that we now see everywhere. Again, we don’t know if this is just for the native speakers alone, or if it includes others.

From the SOAS website

Accounting for endangered languages

For a linguist interested in the study of a language – any language, in a country of over 500 of them – this status quo is one of the most frustrating situations there is. It leads to other equally important and frustrating questions like “How are we sure, now, that the number of languages in Nigeria really/still is 521?” Wikipedia says, also quoting Ethnologue.com, that nine of those languages are already extinct. There is the plausibility that there are more than nine of those languages in the country that have gone extinct. There is also the certainty that, because we don’t know just how many people speak a language, many more languages are already endangered and we may not know it until it is too late. (Read Roger Blench’s sad realisation of this fact in his Research on Minority Languages in Nigeria in 2001). Ethnologue.com, according to the email I received, will not disclose the source of their data.

More work needs to be done, not just by linguists, but by politicians as well. Future census materials, in spite of any threats of sabotage by politicians in any part of the country, should include questions about citizen’s language (and multilingual) capabilities. Religion is certainly less important. But data about language use is not only useful for language research, but also for governmental planning. Funding required to document threatened and endangered languages will come only if we know just what we’re dealing with, and we can’t know that in the absence of reliable data.

According to this source, quoting the National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria’s current population stands at around 170 million people. Back to where we started from, how many of these speak Yorùbá? I have no idea. If I go by the 21%, I’d arrive at 35.7 million people. If we can agree that this is the number of all ethnic Yorùbás in the country, we still need to account for how many are not ethnically Yorùbá but speak the language anyway as a first or second language. And how many of these ethnic Yorùbá identify another language (English, French, German, Hausa, etc) than Yorùbá, as their first language?

Now, let’s substitute “Yorùbá” in this case for any other language in the country, and we’ll see just how terrible the situation is. What is the data? How many people speak these languages as L1 and L2? Is this data reliable? How do we get it? Why can’t we? These are questions that have kept me up at night for a very long time.

___

LINKS

1. How Many Are We In Nigeria? (Nigerian Vanguard, September, 2013)

2. Population and Vital Statistics (PDF)

3. Languages of Africa at SOAS: Yorùbá (SOAS)

4. YORÙBÁ: A language of Nigeria (Ethnologue)

5. Yorùbá Language (Wikipedia)

6. Gradually, Nigerian Languages are Dying (Punch, August 2013)

7. Research on Minority Languages in Nigeria in 2013 (PDF) by Roger Blench

8. Nigerian Population (Trading Economies)

9. A screenshot from the email response from Ethnologue.com

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June 11, 2015 by Dadepo Aderemi

What Google Tells Us About Interest In Yoruba And Yoruba Names

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.

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.

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May 29, 2015 by Kehinde Ligali

My Inspiration to Volunteer

Working with a purpose allows for a fulfilling and effective outcome, and because I believe part of my calling is to educate and equip individuals into being global citizens, serving as a volunteer for the Yoruba Names Dictionary Project presents a platform where I am able to influence a diverse population towards the significance of conserving one another’s cultures.

Living in the United States, I come across a lot of my peers that are progressively losing touch with their roots, specifically with demonstrating proficiency in using their native language/dialect either because their families do not expose them to it at home, or they feel as though they are never going to need it in their future careers. Receiving this kind of negative feedback from those who are supposed to carry on the legacy of these cultures demonstrates why the need to preserve the language is inevitably necessary. Being a Yoruba millennial myself, what better way to aid in the rescue than to join the efforts of this project through preserving and educating society on the sophisticated meanings and pronunciations of Yoruba names.

On the day I first learned about the Yoruba Names Dictionary Project, I was surfing the web and going through various materials on African languages. I then stumbled upon a YouTube video in which Mr. Tubosun was being interviewed on his objectives behind this project. I was certainly captivated as it was the first time I had heard of something of its kind; hence, my inspiration and motivation to join the team.

My role in this project is to expand its awareness to a larger population by carrying out tasks through our social media platforms. We aim for people in all parts of the globe to become aware of our work in order to engage with us in meaningful ways. Our current focus is gathering as many Yoruba names as we can come across, interpret them, and create pronunciations for them.

As the Yoruba language is just a starting point, I believe that this project will eventually present everyone on the continent (and elsewhere) with the luxury of being able to access names in all less commonly spoken languages with a view to ultimately help in individual worldwide efforts to conserve our various (linguistic and cultural) heritages.

___________

Kehinde Ligali is a senior at Indiana University, Bloomington (Class of 2016)

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May 14, 2015 by Laila

Deciphering Character Names in Literary Fiction

After chatting with a Chinese student who is considering joining my school next semester, I can safely say that I am not the only one who became interested in learning Yoruba following repeated encounters with this language in books by Nigerian authors, either in the form of dialogues, italicized words, or – yes – character names.

Understanding Yoruba names and dialogues in English langage fiction is usually not necessary to enjoy reading but it can sometimes enrich the experience. It’s part of what makes langage learning so engaging to me!

The Alao children’s names explained

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, Lola Shoneyin‘s debut novel, is a brilliantly caustic tale of family drama. The story revolves around Baba Segi’s household, composed of himself, his four wives and seven children :

From the eldest child to the youngest, he called them by their names : Segi and Akin, a daughter before a son, from his first wife ; Tope, Afolake and Motun, three girls born eleven months apart, from the second ; and Femi and Kole, sons smugly birthed by Iya Femi, his third wife. (excerpt from chapter 1)

Have you ever wondered what Baba Segi’s children’s names meant ?

Sẹ̀gi is short for Sẹ̀gilọlá (sẹ̀gi.ni.ọlá). Sẹ̀gi is an expensive type of bead and the name means « Sẹ̀gi is wealth ». Incidentally, this is also the name of the narrator in what is considered to be the first novel in Yorùbá, Itan Igbesi-Aiye Emi Segilola, published as a series of 30 instalments in Akede Eko in 1930. The abbreviated name Sẹ̀gi could also stand for Sẹ̀giladé (sẹ̀gi.ni.adé) « Sẹ̀gi is crown / head ».

Akin means « warrior, brave man »

Tọpe is short for Tèmitọpe (tèmi.tọpe) « Mine / my situation deserves gratefulness »

Afọlákẹ́ (a.fi.ọlá.kẹ́) « the one pampered with wealth »

Motún is a short form of Motúnráyọ̀ (mo.tún.rí.ayọ̀) « I have experienced joy again »

Fẹ́mi is the shortened version of Olúwafẹ́mi (Olúwa.fẹ́.mi) « God loves me »

Kọlé is from Kọlédowó (kọ.ilé.de.owó) «Build a house in anticipation of wealth »

Unfortunately, the fourth and youngest wife Bọlánlé (Bá.ọlá.ní.ilé “the one that met wealth in the house”) has failed to give birth to a child. A new addition to the family, Bọlánlé stands out because of her somewhat more priviledged social background and her university education.

The aptly named retired police officer

In search of a solution to his misfortune, Baba Segi finds himself at a dingy bar where he meets up with a callous retired police sergent, the aptly named Ọláọ̀pá (ọlá.ọ̀pá « the benefit/wealth/glory of the baton »). The name is interesting also because it rhymes with the Yoruba translation of “policeman”: Ọlọ́pàá (the wielder of the baton). This is a name given to them because of how colonial police officers always went about with batons instead of firearms.

Throughout the novel, various characters express their perception of Bọ́lánlé’s social status. In the passage in question, language is put forward as a marker of class by Ọláọ̀pá:

Atanda ! You want to land Baba Segi in jail ? Who would dare to drag a graduate ? When she opens her mouth and English begins to pour from it like heated palm oil, the constable will be so captivated, he will throw our friend behind bars!

Though Ọláọ̀pá is but a secondary character in the novel, I found his boisterous ways endearing. Here is a respected man in the community, husband to four wives, boasting about his manly performance and yet we come to understand just how saddled with insecurities he is when faced with the case of the “graduate wife”.

Can you translate the names of your favourite fictional characters?

Photo credit: “Ibadan” by Dassiebtekreuz on Wikipedia. CC BY 2.5 License.

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May 6, 2015 by Tola Odumosu

Here for the possibilities

A certain amount of excitement exists for every project an engineer is involved in, most especially collaborative projects solving a community problem.

The Yoruba Names project has the potential to create a foundation for many other Nigerian/African language technological intervention projects. As it will hopefully be a long-term venture, it presents an unlimited scope for innovation around language and the possibility of bringing together intellectuals for radical innovations.

Just thinking about the sheer potential of such an enterprise was enough a motivation to lend my time and join the already amazing Yoruba Names team as a volunteer developer. Besides, working with a team spanning multiple continents to build an online library of names for a language which is itself spoken across several continents, is an experience not very many projects afford one.

To my mind, the idea of satisfying some simple use cases for anyone desiring to find out more about Yoruba names would be enough to justify the time we’ll be spending on this project. Being able to help that one guy trying to study the language and needing a real tonal text to speech library; or that app developer who wants to build a service based off a language name API; or even simply providing a service for a person anywhere in the world who wishes to look up a name: these are some of the possibilities this project offers, and the reason I’m a part of it.

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Tola Odumosu is Web & Mobile Application Developer, you can read more about him at ttola.me or follow him on twitter @ttola

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April 26, 2015 by Kola Tubosun

A “Thank You” to Collaborators

One of the things that have lubricated the wheel of this project is the support and hard work of a number of people working on different parts on the project, all without pay, and mostly without any glory. Like the ancient translators, many of whom are not even recorded in history, but who dutifully dedicated their time and energy to translating the bible and English hymns into Yoruba and a number of all African languages, there are people on this project without whom we wouldn’t have achieved anything, but with whose dedication I can say confidently that the next couple of weeks will be an exciting one for this dictionary project.

I also want to use this blog post to especially thank the folks at Capital Square, a co-working space in Lagos with whose collaboration we can now use a dedicated “studio” space somewhere in Lekki to record the audio data needed for the TTS (text-to-speech) functionality of the dictionary. I spent some time this weekend in the conducive embrace of that working space, creating a new set of relevant audio recordings. For those who remember, it was on the blog of that same organisation where a guest post I wrote about the dictionary project, while fundraising was still ongoing, was first published.

And while the work continues, here’s a toast to all those whose energy and zeal make it all possible, including a few new volunteers on our dictionary project. Thank you, everyone.

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April 21, 2015 by Laila

From language learner to active volunteer

It’s odd that I found myself volunteering with Yoruba Names and at the same time it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Like Vanessa in the novel In Dependance by Sarah Ladipo-Manyika, there was a time I used to ask myself “Do your names really mean what you say they do?” (…) “Or is this how you like to charm the girls?”. Now that I’ve started learning Yorùbá, I may not be quite as clueless but that sense of wonder has not abated, for I’ve been fortunate enough to come across the most inspiring teachers both at school and online.

My involvement in this project stems from a growing conviction that the diversity of languages existing in the world needs to be better represented online and that we can all take a part in making this happen. On a more personal level, it’s a source of great enjoyment both to learn more about Yorùbá names along the way, and to do so in the company of other passionate volunteers from various backgrounds.

I am going to be the Bénin connection in the team, working in collaboration with Yorùbá speakers as well as local scholars to document the names found in the country. Apart from preparing for this upcoming field work, I am active on the social media and copy-editing fronts, making sure that the world knows what’s happening with the Yoruba Names Dictionary!

Of course, I’m not so naive as to expect everyone to instantly start caring about the accurate pronunciation of names, and even less so about their meaning and history, but it will be quite an achievement if one day soon, the information is available for anyone to look up on their laptops, phones, tablets, or whichever device will have been invented in the years to come.

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General

Never multilingual enough

On the situation of indigenous languages

That’s not all there is to Benin…

An “urging” isn’t what it takes

“I don’t speak my dialect”, they proudly say

Penalised for speaking “vernacular”

The Source of the Problem

Accounting for endangered languages

Trends for search terms related to ‘Yoruba’

Regional data

Related searches

Exonyms or alternative names for ‘Yoruba’

Comparison to other languages

Conclusions

The Alao children’s names explained

The aptly named retired police officer