Yoruba Name

December 19, 2015 by Laila

The week in links

The Yorùbá name of the week is…

Májà ‘Do not fight’.

Here is a roundup of links we shared on social media this week:

On the blogs

The Yoruba blog published a complete photostory of the coronation of ọba Adéyẹyè Ẹnìtàn Ogúnwùsì

If you’re in Lagos, check out the Susanne Wenger Adùnní Olórìṣà Trust exhibition currently showing at the Wheatbaker Hotel in Ikoyi: photos, drawings, paintings, and other works of art by Òsogbo and Òsogbo-influenced artists and about the sacred Òsun Òsogbo Grove are on display.

Blogger Alákọ̀wé has a new video series, in which he takes the viewer on a tour of various London neighbourhoods with commentary in Yorùbá.

Language

The Android app Kasahorow has recently added Yorùbá to its supported languages. You can now type Akan (Fanti, Twi, Akuapem), English, Ga-Dangme, Gbe (Ewe, Ewegbe, Fon), Gikuyu, Hausa, Igbo, Wolof and, yes, Yoruba on your device!

For language enthusiasts, the World Atlas of Language Structures is a fantastic resource, including visualisations of various aspects of language. For instance, here is a map representing the distribution of tonal languages in the world, based on research including 527 languages.

Et pour les francophones…

Dans un article de 1969 paru dans la revue ‘Etudes Dahoméennes’, Machioudi Idriss Dissou retrace l’origine de quelques familles yoruba de Porto Novo à travers leurs oríkì.

Have fun reading!

What else happened this week in your corner of the Internet?

in General 1 comments

October 15, 2015 by admin

[French] Billet invité: Les noms claniques des Ṣabẹ́ du Bénin

Ṣàbẹ́ est une localité située dans le département des Collines au Bénin, et dont la population est linguistiquement et culturellement rattachée à l’aire Yorùbá. La plupart des clans Ṣàbẹ́ attribuent des noms individuels à leurs enfants, et il existe une kyrielle de noms aussi bien pour les garçons que pour les filles.

Ces noms claniques correspondent souvent au rang de naissance de l’enfant mais il convient de préciser qu’ils sont différents des noms de rang de naissance. Ce sont deux types de noms biens distincts: les noms dits “de rang de naissance” sont empruntés aux Bàátọ̀nú avec lesquels les Ṣàbẹ́ partagent des relations de parenté à plaisanterie (gonẹ̀cí). En revanche, les noms claniques permettent dans la plupart des cas d’identifier à la fois l’appartenance à un clan, le sexe et le rang de naissance.

Clan Ajàsọ̀

Les enfants de ce clan reçoivent les noms suivants :

Rang de naissance

1er né

2nd

3ème

Garçons

Mọ̀sìà

Agé

Sọ̀gbà

Filles

Agbàkẹ̀n

Tilé

–

Clan Akọ

Rang de naissance

1er né

2nd

3ème

4ème

Garçons

Agbàcí

Olóní

Gbẹ̀dó

Kòcòní

Filles

Wẹ̀sẹ̀ú

Òòpó

Àgàá

–

Clan Akútúànbẹ

Rang de naissance

1er né

2nd

Garçons

Ajéè

Ọlọ́ta

Filles

Ọjá

Ijègbé

Clan Amùcù

Ce clan est aussi connu sous le nom de Ońlẹ̀. C’est un clan princier tout comme les Ọ̀tọ́lá (voir ci-dessous). Les enfants de ce clan reçoivent des noms tels que :

Rang de naissance

1er né

2nd

3ème

4ème

Garçons

Yáì

Càfàà

Adìmí

Ajẹn-ẹn

Filles

Yẹ́bà Bèjì

–

Clan Eegú

Ce clan voue un culte à la divinité eegú d’où il tire sa dénomination. Les descendants de ce clan reçoivent des noms claniques sans distinction de sexe ni de rang de naissance.

Eegújọbí “nous sommes tous descendants de la divinité eegú.”
Jẹ̀níhẹn “Jẹ̀ a une lignée”
Eegúlétí “La divinité eegú m’a exaucé”
Jẹ̀gbèmí “Jẹ̀ m’a soutenu”

Les noms préfixés par Eegú-, ‘ọjẹ̀-, indiquent que les porteurs sont descendants de ce clan.

Clan Ọgá

Les noms claniques du clan Ọgá ne font pas référence au rang de naissance mais sont différenciés selon le sexe.

Garçons

Ayédìtẹ̀n “le monde est devenu de l’histoire”
Ayédìlú “le monde est devenu un village”
Ayélàùn “le monde fait peur”
Ayélòmí “le monde me dégoûte”
Kúbíyà “la mort engendre la peine”
Ayédẹgẹ́ “le monde est fragile”

Filles

Ilétíkú “c’est de notre entourage que provient notre mort”
Inọ́nihan “le ventre est insondable”
Kámia “soyons prudents”
Lèéminọ̀ “qui peut lire dans la pensée d’autrui ?”
Kámáhòtẹ́n “ne pensons pas à toutes les peines de la vie”

Clan Ọ̀tàà

Rang de naissance

1er

2nd

3ème

4ème

Garçons

Oluku

Apàdó

Apàkí

Ayédọ̀n

Abúmọ̀

Jọ̀mọ́

Sẹ̀ndà

Dàkpánọ̀

Àjẹ̀nẹ̀

Filles

Ejò

Sùú

Dòganí

–

Nanọ

Cánọ̀

–

Remarquons que dans ce clan, plusieurs noms individuels sont réservés au premier enfant de la famille, qu’il soit une fille ou un garçon.

Clan Ọtọ́lá

C’est un clan princier dont les enfants reçoivent les noms suivants :

Rang de naissance

1er

2nd

Garçons

Yabi

Afùdá

Filles

Yẹ́bà

–

Clan Jàbàtá

Rang de naissance

1er

2nd

3ème

Garçons

Awéè

Sámọ̀

–

Ajàmọ̀sì

–

Filles

Ọlájọ́

Ọgẹ̀dú

Edìíbì

Sùnmọ̀ní

Ẹgbẹ̀á

Clan Jàlúmọ̀

Rang de naissance

1er

2nd

3ème

Garçons

Akíyọ̀

Ọ̀fẹn

Ẹtká

–

Filles

Obò

–

Àndó

Òlé

Clan Sẹ̀ngà

Garçons

Premier né: Sẹwọ́ “vomir”, Ògídí, Àsùní “un enfant Dieu donné”
Second: Dẹ̀nọ̀

Filles

Première: Idóó “le fait d’endeuiller”
Seconde: Onẹ̀dọ̀n “l’homme est agréable”, Onídọ̀n “aujourd’hui est meilleur”
Troisième: Olúpé “nous sommes tous présents”

Clan Sọ̀lọ́

Rang de naissance

1er

2nd

Garçons

Cànbí

Sìnẹ̀bú

Ajàbà

Ogíní

Filles

Sọ̀lọ́

–

Bọ́nẹ

–

Profil du contributeur

Le Dr. Moufoutaou ADJERAN est Maître-Assistant des Universités en sociolinguistique à l’Université d’Abomey-Calavi (Bénin). Il est également membre du Laboratoire de Sociolinguistique et d’Etudes en Yoruba et membre du Réseau Francophone de Sociolinguistique.

October 15, 2015 by Laila

Guest post: clan names of the Ṣabẹ́ (Republic of Benin)

Ṣàbẹ́ is a locality of the Collines region in the Republic of Benin, whose inhabitants are linguistically and culturally part of Yorubaland. In most Ṣàbẹ́ clans, personal clan names are assigned to the children and there is a host of such names for both girls and boys.

These clan names are often related to the order of birth but one must bear in mind that they are different from another set of names especially dedicated to the child’s position in the family. Clan names and birth rank names are indeed two different things: the birth rank names used by the Ṣàbẹ́ were borrowed from the Bàátọ̀nú with whom the Ṣàbẹ́ are linked by a kinship-based joking relationship (gonẹ̀cí). In contrast, clan names will in most cases simultaneously identify a person’s clan affiliation, their sex and their birth rank.

Ajàsọ̀ clan

Children of this clan are given names such as:

Order of birth

1st born

2nd

3rd

Male

Mọ̀sìà

Agé

Sọ̀gbà

Female

Agbàkẹ̀n

Tilé

–

Akọ clan

Order of birth

1st born

2nd

3rd

4th

Male

Agbàcí

Olóní

Gbẹ̀dó

Kòcòní

Female

Wẹ̀sẹ̀ú

Òòpó

Àgàá

–

Akútúànbẹ clan

Order of birth

1st born

2nd

Male

Ajéè

Ọlọ́ta

Female

Ọjá

Ijègbé

Amùcù clan

This clan is also known as Ońlẹ̀. It is a princely clan like the Ọ̀tọ́lá clan (see below). Children born to this clan bear names such as:

Order of birth

1st born

2nd

3rd

4th

Male

Yáì

Càfàà

Adìmí

Ajẹn-ẹn

Female

Yẹ́bà Bèjì

–

Eegú clan

This clan worships a deity called eegú, hence its name. Descendants of this clan are given the same clan names irrespective of sex or order of birth.

Eegújọbí “we are all descendants of eegú”
Jẹ̀níhẹn “Jẹ̀ has a lineage”
Eegúlétí “Eegú has granted my wish”
Jẹ̀gbèmí “Jẹ̀ supported me”

Names bearing the prefixes Eegú- or Jẹ̀- indicate that their bearers are members of this clan.

Ọgá clan

Ọgá clan names do not refer to the order of birth but they do provide a differentiation based on the child’s sex.

Male

Ayédìtẹ̀n “the world has become history”
Ayédìlú “the world has become a village”
Ayélàùn “the world is scary”
Ayélòmí “the world disgusts me”
Kúbíyà “death causes sorrow”
Ayédẹgẹ́ “the world is fragile”

Female

Ilétíkú “it is from our surroundings that death arises”
Inọ́nihan “the belly is inscrutable”
Kámia “let’s be cautious”
Lèéminọ̀ “who can read someone else’s thoughts?”
Kámáhòtẹ́n “let’s not think about all of life’s sorrows”

Ọ̀tàà clan

Order of birth

1st

2nd

3rd

Male

Oluku

Apàdó

Apàkí

Ayédọ̀n

Abúmọ̀

Jọ̀mọ́

Sẹ̀ndà

Dàkpánọ̀

Àjẹ̀nẹ̀

Female

Ejò

Sùú

Dòganí

–

Nanọ

Cánọ̀

–

It is worth pointing out that in this clan, several personal names are specifically meant for the first born child of a given family, whether they be a boy or a girl.

Ọtọ́lá clan

It is a princely clan whose children bear the following names:

Order of birth

1st born

2nd

Male

Yabi

Afùdá

Female

Yẹ́bà

–

Jàbàtá clan

Order of birth

1st

2nd

3rd

Male

Awéè

Sámọ̀

–

Ajàmọ̀sì

–

Female

Ọlájọ́

Ọgẹ̀dú

Edìíbì

Sùnmọ̀ní

Ẹgbẹ̀á

Jàlúmọ̀ clan

Order of birth

1st

2nd

3rd

Male

Akíyọ̀

Ọ̀fẹn

Ẹtká

–

Female

Obò

–

Àndó

Òlé

Sẹ̀ngà clan

Male

First born: Sẹwọ́ “to vomit”, Ògídí, Àsùní “a God-given child”
Second born: Dẹ̀nọ̀

Female

First born: Idóó “bereavement”
Second born: Onẹ̀dọ̀n “man is pleasant”, Onídọ̀n “today is better”
Third born: Olúpé “we are all here”

Sọ̀lọ́ clan

Order of birth

1st

2nd

Male

Cànbí

Sìnẹ̀bú

Ajàbà

Ogíní

Female

Sọ̀lọ́

–

Bọ́nẹ

–

Contributor’s profile

Dr. Moufoutaou ADJERAN is a sociolinguistics lecturer at Abomey-Calavi University (Republic of Benin). He is also a member of the Sociolinguistics and Yoruba Studies research centre and of the Francophone Sociolinguistics Network.

The original post was published in French on YorubaName.com. Translation into English by Laila Le Guen.

in Featured / Language / Lexicography 2 comments

August 7, 2015 by admin

Yorùbá Keyboard Layouts for Mac and Windows

Hello YorubaName blog readers and supporters!

A couple of weeks ago, we promised to release Yorùbá Keyboard Layouts to help users of African languages on the internet place tone marks and subdots with the least possible number of keystrokes.

These keyboard layouts for Windows and Mac are here now!

They are designed with love to make typing in these languages as easy as possible. There are certainly other solutions out there, especially on Windows, to type letters with subdots as well as tone marks needed for Yorùbá, Igbo, and many other tonal languages. However, there is a clear advantage in offering both layouts with very similar key combinations for consistency, focusing on the letters “h” and “l” on the keyboard for “high” and “low” tones respectively. The mid-tone is usually left unmarked in most languages.

We hope you’ll have a fantastic time typing anything that takes your fancy.

Download it here.

in General / Language 8 comments

July 20, 2015 by Laila

From the Community: Names Explained by Their Bearers

What is the story of your name? The answer to this question is always deeply personal, touching on family history.

We asked community members to email or tweet an interesting story about their name, with no format restriction. Though the contest launched about a month ago was titled ‘My Name, My Story’, upon reading the pieces, it becomes clear that it would have been more aptly dubbed ‘My name, Our Story’, so deeply embedded they are in a larger context.

Two of the winners have already received their prizes, a YorubaName.com T-shirt…and sent back photographic evidence !

Below are excerpts from the winning entries.

Stephen Adewale Oluwarotimi Ajayi

My names are Stephen Adewale Oluwarotimi Ajayi.

From the moment I could read and write my mother never missed the opportunity to tell me how special I was to her. She had gotten married at a young age (as they all did back then) but was unable to bear a child for my father in the first 6 years. She was getting pregnant though, just wasn’t able to carry to term.
In the 7th year of her marriage I came. Oh yeah, my father came from a line of Adeyemi’s, which means ‘the crown befits me’ so he instantly named me Stephen, which according to my findings means ‘crown’ and then he added Adewale, which means ‘the crown has come home’.
The 6 years drought my mother had, had taken her through a deep journey in seeking her spiritual self and when she ‘took-in’, carried to term and had me (a bouncing baby boy) she immaculately named me Oluwarotimi, which means ‘the Lord stayed with me’. This is a compound name, so to speak, the second part being ‘Rotimi’ (I find this name so soothing), which means ‘Stay with me’. This I did till she left us to the Lord.

Olanrewaju

My name is Olanrewaju. Olanrewaju means ‘honour is continuing’ or ‘honour is moving forward’. (…) At birth and naming, it was glaring that honours continued coming to my father and the entire family as a whole.

My father was a palm wine tapper, he became the head of the tappers (in Agbado/Agidingbi, present Ogun state, Nigeria) in the late 1930s. He left wine tapping/selling to become a stationery and book seller in Jankara market, Lagos state. This business grew from kiosk trade to shop and later departmental store in the late 50s. All this while, only female children were born, with only a male out of the eight.

In the wake of Nigeria’s independence in 1960, my father came home to the village (Iludun-Oro, Kwara State) to give his house a modern architectural facelift. Three years after independence, on August 1st, 1963, I was born, the much awaited male child had come!

Abiodun Temitope Ayotunde Omowon Idowu

Abi’s parents, living in London at the time, had one child before they were advised that, due to medical issues, another pregnancy would pose a severe risk to her mother’s life.

Eight years later, while curled up in the arms of my father in bed at night, my mother had a dream where she saw her father-in-law, dressed as a woman in high fashion and with an ample bosom and he called her name and told her that he was returning to her and that she was three months pregnant and that he would return as a girl, fair of skin and dark of eyes and though men would find her appealing, she would struggle to pick one as a mate.

My mother woke up and while she was struggling with how to tell my startled father who was wondering why she was shaky, the phone rang and my father was informed that his father had passed at midnight. My mother then told my father her dream after he had calmed down and he went and got a pregnancy test kit. It was positive.

As my parents made plans to come for the funeral, my mother convinced my dad to make the move permanent as she was terrified that she would be made to abort her baby. Father agreed and they came home finally and three months and three weeks later I was born in Lagos, premature but strong and healthy and I was immediately named Omowon (a child is rare).

I now have two other siblings. My eyes are dark and a bit fair of skin and though I have been engaged four times, I am yet to pick a mate.

[Abi hasn’t claimed her gift yet, which is why we couldn’t feature her photo on the blog post.]

Although the contest has now ended, we have not stopped receiving emails. Do you have any peculiar story about your name? Send them to us at project@yorubaname.com. We’d love to read (and possibly share) them. We are not definitely promising you a t-shirt for your efforts but you can never know…

in Featured / General 1 comments

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.

in Featured / General 0 comments

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.

in Featured / General 0 comments

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.

in General / Language 1 comments

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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Stephen Adewale Oluwarotimi Ajayi

Olanrewaju

Abiodun Temitope Ayotunde Omowon Idowu

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