Tag Language | Yoruba Name

February 15, 2018 by Laila

#MemeML: Language Diversity Has Never Been So Much Fun!

For the second year in a row, International Mother Language Day (Feb 21) is preceded by a week-long meme campaign that challenges commonly held expectations of minority languages.

Led by co-organizers Rising Voices, the Living Tongues Institute, First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Indigenous Tweets, Endangered Languages Project, and the Digital Language Diversity Project, the 2018 Meme Challenge brings together individual language advocates and organizations from around the world to highlight the cause of language diversity online, with a humorous twist. Last year’s edition led to the translation of the Meme Challenge website into 34 languages, including Yorùbá, and the creation of memes in languages like Asturian, Inuktitut and Bengali, to name just three.

As a collective that is deeply committed to supporting diverse language use online, the YorubaName team invites you to add your voice to this meme challenge. The only requirements are an Internet connection and a good sense of humor! You can find user-friendly meme templates on websites such as MemeGen and Memegenerator (need more tips? Head over here.)

This is a unique opportunity to collaborate on a global level and share your love of language with the world. The celebration will culminate on February 21^st, with International Mother Language Day, a special day that recognizes the importance of each language and sheds light on speaker communities that are too often forgotten or denigrated in official discourse.

February 21^st also marks Speak Yoruba Day! What started as a campaign to pressure Twitter into offering a Yoruba interface, has taken a life of its own and become a yearly social media event during which participants post in Yorùbá, share each other’s posts and generally delight in the Yorùbá language. No matter your language level or confidence in writing it, you are welcome to the party :). This year, we are also inviting people who speak every other Nigerian language to join in with their own language as well. The International Mother Tongue Day is set aside by UNESCO to help call attention to language diversity around the world.

Look out for #MemeML on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and fill our timelines with all the beautiful languages you speak! See you on the web!

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.

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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.

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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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