Tag Yoruba names | Yoruba Name

July 8, 2016 by Laila

Yorùbá Name on the road: University of Ibadan

On 1^st July, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún and I were invited by IFRA Nigeria to present the Yorùbá Name project at the University of Ibadan. As I’ve been contributing remotely from Nairobi and other places, I could never have imagined how warm the response from both students and professors would be. It’s one thing to be told that people at UI are taking the project to heart, it’s another to sit in front of a room full of knowledgeable, passionate Yorùbá speakers loudly debating the breakdown of the name Sójìmí. If this is what linguistic research allied to technology can do, I definitely want more of it!

Beyond the heart-warming feeling of speaking to an enthusiastic audience, our trip to Ibadan was a great opportunity to establish links with a dynamic university community, and UI didn’t disappoint in this regard. We left convinced more than ever that the geolocation of names is going to be of crucial importance to establish patterns, due to the dialectal distribution of the Yoruba language. This was illustrated in particular by a couple of names from Ondo State that had previously eluded the Yoruba Name community, yet were well-known to some participants from this area, who could explain their meaning and origin. This observation certainly highlights the need for finer research into local naming practises in the various regions where Yorùbá is spoken.

One underlying current behind all the questions and comments that kept us engaged until time ran out, was how personal the project felt to participants. Some worried about how ‘funkifying’ one’s name could affect the course one’s destiny as inscribed in the name given at birth, while others recalled the long road they had taken to understand the meaning of their names and it seemed that all had a sense of how meaningful a name can be.

After hearing a few personal accounts of how a person’s name came to be, I have become increasingly interested in listening to more such stories, because meaning is never univocal. Instead, it is found in carefully peeling back the layers to gradually expand the perspective: first the combination of words that form the name, then the deeper signification of this utterance in a particular context. And there is more. In there is the back story of a person’s birth which is a family history, ensconced in a vaster community of memory. A website such as this one can never capture all these family histories criss-crossing the bigger canvas of History, but it can probably do a little to help those looking for a clue.

I left Drapers Hall with a renewed desire to continue devoting time to this project, to follow these threads of meaning across language and time and to keep on learning from all the people I meet along the way.

The full report of the Drapers Hall event can be found here on the IFRA website.

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May 30, 2016 by Dadepo Aderemi

Codebase now on GitHub!

One of the things we highlighted after the beta launch of Yorubaname.com was our desire to move the development of the YorubaName dictionary more into the public domain. In the post ‘What is in a Beta‘, I mentioned that moving forward, we would like to have both the project’s backlog and codebase accessible to the general public. This would empower whosoever is interested to be able to contribute to the building of what is fast growing to be the largest dictionary of Yorùbá names on the internet.

Today, I am happy to announce that we have done exactly that. The codebase that powers both the YorubaName.com website and YorubaName dashboard application can now be found on GitHub (https://github.com/Yorubaname) where you’ll have access to 3 repositories:

The General-information: this contains basic general information needed to get started contributing to the project.
The Yorubaname-dashboard: this contains the codebase for the dashboard application.
The Yorubaname-website: this contains the codebase for the core dictionary and the website

With the codebase now on GitHub, we hope that the development effort behind the YorubaName dictionary, which started off in February 2015, and has been carried by four volunteer developers, will now grow to attract even more people willing to contribute expertise around software development to the project.

The development story: how it all started.

The development story of the YorubaName dictionary started off last year. It was kickstarted by an email I sent Kola Tubosun on a Friday, the 9th of January 2015.

The Yorùbá Name project had bobbed into my consciousness, though I can’t remember exactly how. If I were to guess, I would say it was via Twitter. I remember digging a little deeper into what the project was about and what it aimed to achieve and saying to myself: this would be something I would like to help bring to life.

So I got in touch with Kọ́lá, letting him know I would be interested in joining forces towards the building of the YorubaName dictionary. We exchanged a couple of emails, and by Monday, 12th of January 2015, while the fund raising drive was beginning to garner full speed on Indiegogo, we got working on our first task: setting up a prelaunch page for the project on www.yorubaname.com

Screenshot of the first landing page

Kọ́lá already knew Koko Godswill, a web/graphics designer who was also willing to volunteer and contribute to the project. He is largely responsible for the current look and feel of the dictionary. Not only did he help with the website, he has also worked a great deal towards meeting our various graphic design needs, most notably during the countdown to launch in February 2016 (See #YNLaunch).

But Koko was not to be the only person contributing. By February 2015, we got another contributor in the person of Esther Olatunde. She has helped tremendously in various ways, especially the setting up and the running of our blog at blog.yorubaname.com. We also had Luis from Brazil/UK who prepared a few mock-up wireframes on which we based earlier deliberations.

Then in April, Tola Odumosu got on board. He wrote about his motivation for volunteering here. Tola contributed substantial code to what later became the dashboard application which our lexicographers use to manage the name entries in the dictionary.

And thus from January 2015, Koko, Esther, Tola and myself were the developers who volunteered alongside Kola and the lexicography team to build the beta version of YorubaName.com released in February 2016. We were 4 technical people, located in different parts of the world: I was based in the Netherlands, Esther was contributing from Ghana, and Koko and Tola in Nigeria. We worked in our spare time towards the same goal and in a little over 12 months we were able to build a beta version of the dictionary, which at the time of writing has grown to contain over three thousand Yorùbá names.

The road ahead for the dev team

The current version of the YorubaName dictionary was made possible by the contribution of a handful of people. But now that we have opened up the codebase for more people to potentially get involved, the question is: what could be achieved next?

There is still a lot to be built. We have lots of interesting ideas and features yet to be implemented: from a ‘name finder’ feature – a tool to assist expecting parents in finding the perfect Yorùbá name for their children – to text-to-speech, to making the website more Wiki-like. We also plan on adding offline capabilities (especially for the dashboard application), improving the search experience, mobile optimisation etc.

So if you have a strong skill set in software development and you also happen to be passionate about culture and language, then the YorubaName project is something you would want to get involved with. Do not hesitate to get in touch on project@yorubaname.com. You can also, right away, fork the project on GitHub and let us start building this dictionary together!

February 22, 2016 by Dadepo Aderemi

What is in a Beta?

At about 10:30 on February 19, 2016, the Yorubaname.com dictionary became fully accessible to the general public.

This enabled users to not only search and view names in the dictionary, but to also submit names and suggest improvement for already published names.

The release on February 19, 2016 was the beta release of the Yorubaname.com dictionary, the result of about one year of active development.

What do we have in the Beta release?

We have a functional website for the dictionary, and a dashboard application to manage the names in the dictionary.

For a bit over twelve months, the Yorubaname development team has been neck deep busy, bringing to life the core functionalities that will be needed to run a name dictionary.

Little by little we saw the features slowly taking shape and about 2 months ago we agreed that the core foundation for the dictionary had been laid. We had made enough progress to have a functionally working dictionary although we might not have finished building all the features we wanted.

And this is what this Beta release is about: it signifies that the dictionary is now usable, with its core foundation laid, providing the groundwork for us to work on future features and improvements. I will quickly touch on some of the core part of the dictionary that is now functional with the beta release.

We now have a functional website
The Yorubaname dictionary is available at Yorubaname.com. It is the public facing part of the dictionary. In the beta release users can:

Search the database for names
View the details of names if already present in the database
Submit a name, if a name is not present
Submit feedback to names already published

Search the database for names
At the homepage at Yorubaname.com, a user can start their name search experience, by typing in the name in the search box. We provide an auto-complete feature to aid with this:

Auto-complete view

The auto-complete feature shows the first 5 entries that match what is being typed it is in no way a list of all the names in the dictionary. The user will know if a name exists by just pressing “enter” after entering the name, even if it does not show in the auto-complete bar.

Should a user have a specific name in mind, and know its tone marks, they would be happy to know that this beta version has an onscreen keyboard to help make their search as exact as possible:

Onscreen keyboard

Another alternative to aid with tone-marking is to grab the Yoruba keyboard layout we made for Windows and Mac users here.

View the details of names if already present in the database
When a name that has already been included in the dictionary is searched for, the user would be redirected to a result page with details like below;

Name details view

The name entry page shows the following attributes of a name:

Meaning and extended meaning
Its morphology and gloss
Geo location, i.e. region a name is mostly found or where the name originates
Media links and famous people who bear the name
Variants to the name

Power User tip: you can try searching the database not just for a name but also using an English word…for example search for “love”…this is part of a feature we are working on, a sort of baby name finder, that allows parent to find the perfect name for their kids by specifying certain attributes.

Submit a name, if a name is not present
If per chance the name you are looking for is not in the database, do not despair: we have a functionality that allows the user to submit a name. Our lexicographers would see the suggested name and work on adding it to the database.

Name not found view

Submit name view

Submit feedback to names already published
If a user thinks something is not accurate about a name, or some part of the attributes can be improved, then the user can contribute to making our dictionary more accurate by leaving a feedback for the name.

Submit feedback

names can also be listed alphabetically:

Alphabetic listing of names

This basically provides an overview of what we have worked on, with the beta release at Yorubaname.com. Next up is the back office: where I provide a brief overview of what comes with the beta release in terms of the dashboard application.

We now have a functional Dashboard

The website at Yorubaname.com is the public side of the Yorubaname dictionary, and is the major point of interaction for users. However, the past twelve months of work have not solely been about building this public facing side of the dictionary, we have also worked on the dashboard application: the part of Yorubaname.com used by lexicographers to manage the name entries in the dictionary.

Dashboard home page

With the beta release, we have been able to build the following core functionalities into the dashboard.

Ability to add, modify, and delete names in the database
Ability to publish names, which is the act of making names in the dictionary available to be seen on the dictionary website
Ability to see all the feedback given by users to name entries
Ability to see and react to names submitted by users
An access control system that allows admins to control what lexicographers can do and not do within the dashboard

Here are some screenshots of how the dashboard looks

Entry view

Add/Modify view

Suggested names view

Although a lot of work has gone into creating a very functional dashboard as of today, we have plans to make it much better in the coming months.

After a Beta, what’s next?

A lot.

The beta release was definitely a milestone, but it does not in any way mark the completion of our efforts with the Yorùbá Names Dictionary. There is still a lot to do and we are ever pumped up to continue what we have started.

Our backlog is bursting with interesting features, yet to be implemented: like the baby name finder tool I hinted at.

Apart from the new features, activities are on-going to refine the ones already implemented. Other things in the pipeline include a “Text to Speech” feature, which will give users the ability to hear the pronunciation of the listed names.

We will also be making the dictionary itself more wiki like, so as to enable more collaborative editing of name entries by users. Also, we plan to work on internalization which will allow the dictionary website to be available in other language apart from English. The list of the features still left to be built is almost endless and the interesting work is just beginning!

Another thing we would also like to do, moving forward, is to have the development of the application more in the open. This would involve us making our backlog public and moving the code base for both the dashboard and website to a public repository (most likely Github). This would be the first step towards having an open source tool out of the efforts of Yorùbá Names Dictionary, with the next step being extracting the core of yorubaname.com into a separate codebase.

Why open source? We believe and hope by making the software part of creating a dictionary (either for names or otherwise) available, we would be able to inspire others to create similar dictionaries, thereby contributing to capturing and preserving the wealth of knowledge that may be in languages that are not readily represented on the world wide web.

We wish to congratulate all who have been part of this journey thus far: the developers and volunteers who have helped in various capacities and the supporters who backed up the Indigogo fund.

Truth is…a ṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ n mú ẹyẹ bọ̀ l’ápò ni.

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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…

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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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Yoruba names