Yoruba

April 15, 2018  by

It’s Time for an Online Yorùbá Dictionary

At least once a week these days, someone tags me on a post on Facebook, or on a tweet, asking for the meaning of a Yorùbá word. Often, it will be a word I know and I can help explain. In other times, it would be a word of whose meaning I’m not sure, or of whose meaning I’d been searching myself for a while. In the latter cases, I re-share the query to my friends, colleagues, and social media acquaintances, and in a few hours, we are usually able to find the meaning. It is usually an experience that leaves me more educated or enlightened than I previously was.

Over the last couple of years, as my reputation grew online as someone, even if mildly, competent in Yorùbá language, culture, and lexicography, so has the frequency of these interactions all around social media, with friends, and often times with random strangers confident that my knowledge would be enough to save the day or point them in the right direction. It’s not a totally misplaced confidence (since, even when I’m ignorant, I have sufficient background and connection to find what they’re looking for, or direct them to the right place), but it had also eaten into my own personal space and time.

And so, a few years ago, after we launched YorubaName.com as a first multimedia dictionary of names, the idea of another multimedia dictionary of Yorùbá language began to weigh in my mind. It was disturbing that there was no reliable place online where one could find the meaning of Yorùbá words. There are printed dictionaries with varying competence, scattered websites, and projects all around the web for sure, but none of them was comprehensive, free, easily accessible, and with a multimedia component. This last part has turned out to be very important in helping those who use YorubaName.com figure out how the names are pronounced – especially for foreigners encountering them for the first time. It is also a part that published books are unable to replicate.

However, even more interestingly for me, a student of language in general, I began to be disturbed by the absence of a Yorùbá-Yorùbá dictionary anywhere at all. All the Yorùbá dictionaries I had seen or bought or used since I’d been interested in the subject were bilingual, such that one could call them translation dictionaries. They are good to have if the aim was for users to translate their thoughts into English or meant only for users who spoke English alone and merely wanted to know the meaning of a Yorùbá word they’d come across, but not for much else. This is not an exclusively Yorùbá problem, I should point out. Everywhere the word “Yorùbá” is used in this essay, one could easily replace it with “Igbo” or “Hausa” or “Fulfude” or “Esan” and it would still be relevant, sometimes even in a worse way for some of these languages.

And so, we have decided to expand into a more ambitious lexicography project: a fully multimedia dictionary of Yorùbá that is free, open, accessible, comprehensive, and – importantly – monolingual. What this means is that while the definition of the words will have English translations/interpretations present (I guess that makes it monolingual-bilingual dictionary), it won’t be its primary feature. Users will be able to use the dictionary to understand what Yorùbá words mean in a different language (English/French/German/etc), but its focus will be in defining words in Yorùbá for speakers (and learners) of the language. Thus, instead of a traditionally Yorùbá-English dictionary, this will be a Yorùbá-Yorùbá-English (where English can be expanded to French/German/Portuguese etc later). It will also be multimedia, with a chance to embed photographs, audios, and videos.

There are many reasons for this focus on Yorùbá-Yorùbá first. First, we have always believed that development comes from innovation and that innovation cannot happen when one cannot think properly in their mother tongue. So empowering a Nigerian language, starting with Yorùbá, for which we have a volunteer team on the ground, to properly cope with the 21st-century reality is the first step in this direction. Some state governments around Nigeria (like Lagos) are already empowering their educational sectors to use local languages as a medium of instruction. This is a good thing. Creating more tools that are universally available and accessible to everyone with an internet connection will complement these new efforts and empower speakers of these languages to better understand their language and innovate with it. Think of an Igbo dictionary with Igbo definitions. Same for Edo or Berom or Ibani. Having these tools available online will also help these languages better interact with technology – a problem that has plagued many African languages since the invention of the world wide web.

And so, let me introduce you to our new project at www.YorubaWord.com and www.OroYoruba.com.

This will be the first of its kind that is crowdsourced, multimedia, and free to use. The crowdsourcing element, just like for YorubaName.com, will ensure that users are also part of the data-gathering team and our first feedback mechanism. New words will be added by users searching for them as well as by the in-house lexicographers and our collaborative researchers. Along with the aid of other resources from published materials and archives from over many decades of scholarship, we hope that this becomes the primary place for learning about Yorùbá words. The element of English incorporated as a complementary feature will also help this work function as a translation dictionary for those who might need it.

As with our earlier projects, there will also be sister projects with other Nigerian languages as soon as we find volunteer lexicographers and other kinds of support to bring them to life. For this, we have also bought IgboWord.com, HausaWord.com, and a few others. Earlier this year, we got an $8000 endowment from a Nigerian couple towards the Yorùbá aspect of this effort, which is why it is the first language to take off. We are still seeking other collaborations.

Our work at YorubaName has always been an intervention in the cultural space as a way to open up an underrated industry of African language technology and empower cultural enthusiasts, developers, scholars, and others, to document local knowledge in technologically accessible formats and empower us to better fit in the modern age. This was why we created a text-to-speech project in November 2017 at www.ttsYoruba.com and to help to pronounce the names in the Names Dictionary. It is why we released a free tonemarking software for Igbo and Yorùbá, and it is also why we are currently working to create artificial speech recognition solutions for Nigerian languages. It is why we are supporting efforts to create IgboName.com as a sister site to YorubaName.com. It is why we will continue to explore opportunities, in business, civil society, education, technology, and others, to empower our languages and cultures, and help them thrive in this century and into the next.

We continue to rely on your support. You can continue to reach us at project@yorubaname.com or donate to the project using this paypal link.  Meanwhile, you can follow the new project at www.YorubaWord.com and at http://www.twitter.com/YorubaWord. New volunteers are welcome too.

in Language / Lexicography 3 comments
March 12, 2018  by

Yorùbá Tonemarking Workshop in Lagos

On Saturday, March 10, 2018, YorubaName held its first Yorùbá language tonemarking workshop at Capital Square in Lekki, Lagos. It was a four-hour interactive class designed to demystify the Yorùbá tone in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and attendees were drawn from various sectors of society, from law to journalism to tech to economics. They each paid 5,000 naira to attend, although there were five free slots provided by the support we got from an anonymous donor as well as Capital Square, Lagos.

The idea to have such a class/workshop has been with us for a while, but it kicked into high gear this week when the suggestion on twitter was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. Tonemarking words/sentences in Yorùbá is one part of learning the language that most people have admitted having problems with. Yorùbá is a tone language, like Mandarin, Vietnamese, and a number of other world languages that use pitch variation to change the meaning of words. Famous examples in Yorùbá are the words ọkọ́ (hoe), ọkọ (husband), ọkọ̀ (vehicle), ọ̀kọ̀ (spear), which mean different things depending on the tone marks placed on the vowels.

Because of a declining interest in local language education in Nigeria, and the pervasive attitude among Nigerian elites that teaching and learning in English alone was desirable as a means to success, teaching Yorùbá (or Igbo, Hausa, and other Nigerian languages) had suffered, and nowhere more seriously with regards to Yorùbá than in the teaching of tonemarking, which is a cornerstone of the language. Even in natural language processing, overcoming the tone is always one of the first challenges to conquer before anything can be done (which explains our focus on, and work with, TTSYorùbá a few months ago).

When I was growing up in Ìbàdàn and reading literature in Yorùbá, it was never a normal thing to see a text written in the language without appropriate tone marks. Sure, people sometimes made mistakes in writing, but the default state of things whenever the language was presented in text paid respect to the work of scholars who had created a writing orthography. Occasionally in public, one came across signboards with poorly-written texts showing the writer wasn’t a Yorùbá-literate person, but official documents written in the language at least tried to comply with the writing rules. It seemed though, over the years, that an unwritten consensus was reached that formal rules be left to literatures-in-Yorùbá alone and spared from other platforms. So, over time, we started seeing more texts everywhere (in newspapers, signboards, movies, etc) which weren’t tonemarked at all, and subject to ambiguous interpretation.

This book, published in 1980, has hand-inserted tonemarking on the cover.

The result of this is a pernicious culture of nonchalance that eventually returned to consume the Yorùbá literary industry itself, but not before destroying African literature in general and messing up the work of the older generation of scholars who bequeathed the heritage in the first place. Today, not many books are published in the language. Those that are, needed a lot of resources to publish because software manufacturers haven’t created enough tools to write Yorùbá tones, so publishers are reluctant to make the effort to secure them. Eventually, the industry collapsed.  In the past, even when the relevant typefaces weren’t available to render tonemarked Yorùbá vowels, postproduction efforts were put in place to ensure that the books still properly rendered the language (see attached image). But over time, that willingness waned and took with it a chance for an industry to pressure technological corporations to create the tools needed for writing. It took the recent effort of our team, in 2015, by creating a free downloadable tonemarking software, to empower a new generation of writers intent on writing the language correctly.

But the problem doesn’t only affect the Yorùbá literary industry. As I’ve mentioned in previous places, sometimes while reviewing Nigerian literature in English, it is a shame to see a Yorùbá writer in English go to long lengths to cater to the writing systems of other languages whose words are used in his/her work but totally ignore it deals with Yorùbá.

I once asked Wọlé Ṣóyínká (Africa’s first Nobel Laureate) in person what, in his opinion, was the reason why writers-in-English of his generation didn’t care to properly tonemark Yorùbá words/names in their work. He didn’t have an answer. Instead, he asked me to read the preface to his latest play Alápatà Àpáta which, in truth, dealt with the subject in considerable detail, focusing on the playwright’s own angst at watching Yorùbá and non-Yorùbá actors mangle the pronunciation of simple Yorùbá names when they could pronounce even more complex European ones. But he never successfully defended why, over the years, none of his own earlier plays, published by the big and established publishers, had been consistent with the tone marking of character names and their lines. What I wanted to know was whether this was at the insistence of these publishers (many of which were led by either foreigners or Nigerians who were trained abroad) who wanted conformity with British standards or usually ignoring anything that didn’t feel English, or whether it was a result of nonchalance by the writers themselves, for not insisting (as some modern writers have – see Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, etc) that this be done.

A couple of weeks ago, the Lagos State Government passed a law making it compulsory to learn Yorùbá in its schools. It was a brave step in the right direction and a return to focus on local language education as an equally important part of child upbringing. But years of neglect has decimated the teacher population for this language, many of whom have switched to other subjects. So, now that a demand exists, we are taking it upon ourselves to help train new people in filling the gap.

But these series of classes aren’t directed as intending teachers alone. Individuals around the country, first-time learners of Yorùbá, expats living in Lagos and are interested in learning the skill, tech professionals and other types of professionals interested in the language, will all benefit. Our aim is to ensure that the skill of tonemarking is restored to its pride of place in the learning and speaking of Yorùbá. No one can claim to be a good writer/reader of the language without being able to successfully tell the difference between Adésọ́lá and Adéṣọlá. No longer should we have to read ambiguous road signs because the writer couldn’t go through the pains of learning to write properly in the target language. By providing training opportunities of this nature for willing participants across the state and beyond, we hope to rejuvenate the language, provide educational opportunities for willing learners, and restore writing and reading in Yorùbá to a good place in this society.

A second workshop has been planned for April 6, 2018. It will hold at (and is supported by) Civic Hive, Yaba, Lagos. This one is free and open to all and you can register here. With sponsorship and support, we might be able to make this a regular monthly workshop for all interested participants at an affordable price – or for free. An online class is also being planned going forward. (So, if you would like to support us, send an email to us at project@yorubaname.com). We are glad for this opportunity to help educate the public and revitalize a language, but more importantly, we are excited that an appetite exists for this kind of intervention.

in General / Language 2 comments
February 4, 2017  by

Mother Language Day to Be Celebrated with Yorùbá Memes

Every year since 2014, 21st February has marked #TweetYorùbá day, an online campaign running concurrently with UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, in which we flood our social media streams with posts in Yorùbá and bring attention to issues of language diversity online and offline.

This year, we start the fun early with a very exciting concept: an international meme campaign in languages such as Bambara, Swahili, Galo, Bininj Kunwok, Euskara, Pular and more, all under one hashtag: #MemeML.

Spanish meme “when you only speak one language…”

A fun way to celebrate linguistic diversity

Co-organized by Rising Voices and the Living Tongues Institute, First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Indigenous Tweets, Endangered Languages Project, First Languages Australia, and the Digital Language Diversity Project, the project is a fantastic opportunity to connect with other groups around the world who are working towards advancing their own languages, whether it be in the form of revitalisation efforts or a struggle for greater recognition in the public sphere. The official website’s introductory message has already been translated into 23 languages including Pular, Bambara and Afrikaans, and speakers of other languages are warmly invited to join in.

In previous editions of International Mother Language Day, online activities focused primarily on using Twitter as a way to promote endangered, minority, indigenous, and heritage languages. But this year is a bit different, as Eddie Avila, director of Rising Voices, explains:

We are hoping to make it a month-long activity culminating on February 21. We chose to try something different this year, and thought memes might be a fun and more creative way to encourage and celebrate linguistic diversity on the internet. 

With just 17 days to go, #MemeML needs all hands on deck to make this month-long event a true representation of language diversity and language activism online. Participants are already flooding in from all corners of the globe and together, we can make a point of adding our voices to showcase important aspects of Yorùbá culture as well as the need to preserve the language.

Add your creative voice!

At YorubaName, we were instantly taken with the idea and we’d love for Yorùbá memes to be a part of the global #MemeML. Here is how you can help:

1. Draw attention to Meme ML by sharing social media posts and inviting others to participate.

2. Create a meme and share it on all your social media platforms with the hashtags: #MemeML and #Yorùbá or #Yoruba. Feel free to tag all your friends as well, since fun is known to be contagious! You can also share your creations on this Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mememl

3. Translate this page into Yorùbá and send your translation to project@yorubaname.com

in Featured / Language 0 comments
December 25, 2015  by

Can you help this couple pick the perfect Yorùbá name for their baby?

 “Many Google searches around Yorùbá names emanate from future parents who are looking for a beautiful name for their child, a name that will reflect their values and their personal journey to parenthood. One such couple reached out to us a few days ago, sharing their story of cross-cultural love and their desire to find a unique combination of names representing all of their child’s heritage.

Read on to find out if you can help them on their quest for the perfect Yorùbá name!

Obi and Tọ́lá* spent nearly their whole lives in the UK and moved to Lagos a few years ago to pursue career opportunities. 2015 has brought the couple wonderful news: they’re expecting their first child! Like any parents-to-be, they are faced with many decisions, one of them being the choice of their child’s name. The baby’s gender isn’t known yet but Obi and Tọ́lá have already made up their minds about one thing: his or her names will be a compound of Obi’s Igbo and Tọ́lá’s Yorùbá culture.

After much online searching, Obi and Tọ́lá haven’t quite come across the kind of Yorùbá name they’re seeking…The YorubaName dictionary hasn’t officially launched yet but that doesn’t mean we can’t help them find a great name!

Here are some of the criteria your suggested name(s) should meet:

  • Easy to pronounce. Though both parents speak their respective languages, they weren’t exposed to enough Yorùbá and Igbo to be able to master every single sound and they find longer, more complicated names difficult to pronounce. The name shouldn’t include any ‘gb’ sound, lest aunties spend a great many hours correcting the parents on the pronunciation of their own child’s name!
  • Straighforward spelling
  • Not so long that it would be routinely shortened
  • Ideally an uncommon name. Avoid beginnings such as Olú… Olúwa… Adé… Bàbá etc.
  • Obi and Tọ́lá are not keen on names referring to wealth, or focusing on the parents’ life, feelings and struggles. They would like a name whose theme solely celebrates their baby.

In case some more background might help you find inspiration, you should know that both parents are Christians and that the baby is going to be the first grandchild on the mother’s side and the third on the father’s side. If a girl, the baby will be the first female grandchild in the family.

Crowdsourcing a name is so 2016! Send your name ideas to project@yorubaname.com, message us on our Facebook page or tweet us @yorubanames. You can also drop your comments below. Thanks in advance for all your contributions!

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* To preserve the couple’s privacy, we didn’t use their real names.

Update 03/06/2016: Obi and Tọ́lá’s little girl was born a few days ago. They chose the name Tiwanìfẹ́ “Ours is love”.

in General 5 comments
August 7, 2015  by

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 10, 2015  by

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.

JPN

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

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!

Kola3I 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

How Many People Speak Yorùbá?

From Google

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.

Screen Shot 2015-06-12 at 10.26.58 AM

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

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 SOAS

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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May 9, 2015  by

The Curious Case of Written Nasals

For a while, I’ve noticed the absence of tone marks on the Yoruba “n” and “m”. But, thinking about it now, I realize that noticing that absence itself is conditioned by an awareness of an earlier presence of the feature in some old published literature.

I grew up reading literature in both Yoruba and English, and I am still capable of conjuring the moods and affectations that occasioned my reading of works by Adebayo Faleti, Bamiji Ojo, J.F. Odunjo, Akinwunmi Ishola, etc. It is perhaps the same reason why in thinking back to the features of some of those writings, I remember having come across the syllabic nasals written with the tone mark. Like in a word like “Bọ́lánlé”, for example, or “Ọláńrewájú”. More than the tone-marked syllabic nasal, in fact, my memory of those times includes a whole lot of dynamic and exciting diacritics on written Yoruba vowels.

Fullscreen capture 552015 104003 AM.bmpFor some reason, however, most of these symbols are gone,  no longer to be found in written literature  – at least those published after the nineties. I remember once seeing the caron, a v-shaped (so called “assimilated low-tone”) sign that was used to replace a vowel cluster (as seen in “Káṣimáawòó”). Instead of the two “òó” as in this case, there’d just be one “o”, carrying the caron, signifying the two contrasting tone marks it carries. There is also a reverse of this sign, the inverted “v”  circumflex which is used to signify the combination of a high tone and a low one. There was a tilde /  ̃/signifying nasality, and a macron / ̄ /showing mid-tone. These are all gone, not just in writing, but in some cases in computer keyboards as well. But none is more curious for me today than the disappearance of the tone mark on the syllabic nasal.

The syllabic nasal, so called because of its ability to (without having more than just a single letter) embody the properties of a distinct syllable, has always carried a tone mark for obvious reason. It is the unit of sound, and must necessarily account for the tone it carries. In other instance of the nasal where it is not syllabic (e.g. the “n” in “Olatubosun”, “Adeosun”, etc), the “n” is simply left alone as a ghostly presence, physically symbolizing the end of the word, and phonetically representing the nasality that exists, actually, on the preceding vowel (in this case, “u”). When it’s syllabic, however, it, in itself, is the syllable, occupying a pride of place in the word (e.g. the “n” in “Bolanle”, and the “m” in “Odunmbaku”). Broken down into syllabic components, the names would be “Bo-la-n-le” and “O-dun-m-ba-ku” respectively, leaving the syllabic nasals alone as the masters of their syllabic domains).

IMG_1494

“Aare-Ago Arikuyeri” by Lawuyi Ogunniran (1977)

So, what happened? We used to see the words written as “Bọ́láńlé” and “Ọdúnm̀bákú” respectively, with the tone marks placed on the “n” and “m” to show their place in the realm. But today, most written Yoruba literature (and there are not many of them) write them as “Bọ́lánlé” and “Ọdúnmbákú,” with nothing showing the syllabic nasals as anything different from their mere filler equivalent. My suspicion is that the Yoruba tone-marking rule (“Only vowels should be tone-marked”) which used to accept exceptions for syllabic nasals, eventually became universal, wiping out whatever is left of the initiative to continue tone-marking syllabic nasals. Standardization efforts over the years have only too permanently registered their influences on the language, leaving us with what we have now.

Now, I should probably clarify that much of the published literature from which I’ve drawn this conclusion are written in English (by Yoruba writers, no less). However, the fact that tone marks are placed on every other syllable in the word, but not on the syllabic “n” and “m”, in all those cases, is curious enough. Being aware of this phenomenon is also enough incentive, now, to pay more attention to what conventions have been accepted, over time, by the Yoruba publishing community (or what’s left of them) as the orthography of syllabic nasals. This piece helps with some explanation, but not enough. Creating a dictionary compels these kinds of interesting observations as, I realize, what users see more often over time will usually become their perception of what is appropriate for future everyday use.

IMG_1516

“Ireke Onibudo” by D.O. Fagunwa (Nelson: 1949-2008)

In the pictured text above, from a play Aare-Ago Arikuyeri by Lawuyi Ogunniran (published in 1977), the conventions have been retained, so only current literature can offer a better explanation. For all we know, I may have just been reading the wrong texts. On the other hand, looking through each of the five classic novels by D.O. Fagunwa published by Nelson (pictured left) showed another extreme instance: none of the vowels were marked at all, except the special ẹ and ọ, and sometimes an occasional  ̃ playing the part of a caron or circumflex. How people, particularly students, managed to get through the text (that have remained popular with the Yoruba over the years) without breaking a sweat will, for a while, remain a mystery.

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