Yoruba language

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Yoruba (native name Yorúbà) is a dialect continuum of sub-Saharan Africa. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and traces of it are found among communities in Brazil and Cuba (where it is called Nago). It belongs to the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family, and has over 22 million speakers. Yoruba is an isolating, tonal language with SVO syntax. Apart from referring to the dialect cluster and its speakers as a whole, the term Yoruba is used for the standard, written form of the language.

This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

History

The ancestor of the Yoruba speakers is, according to their oral traditions, Oduduwa, son of Olúdùmarè, the supreme god of the Yoruba. Although they share a common history, it is only since the second half nineteenth century that the children of Oduduwa share one name. Before the abolition of the slave trade, some Yoruba groups were known among Europeans as Akú, a name derived from the first words of Yoruba greetings such as Ẹ kú àárọ̀ ‘good morning’ and Ẹ kú alẹ́ ‘good evening’.^[1] At some stage the term Yariba or Yoruba came into use, first confined to the Ọyọ Kingdom; the term was used among the Hausa also but its origins are unclear. Under the influence of Samuel Crowther and subsequent missionaries, and for a large part due to the development of a written version of the language, the term Yoruba was extended to include all speakers of related dialects.

Dialects

The Yoruba dialect continuum consists of over fifteen varieties which can be classified into three major dialect areas: Northwest, Central, and Southeast.^[2]

Northwest Yoruba.
- Abẹokuta, Ibadan, Ọyọ, and Ọṣun areas
Central Yoruba
- Ekiti, Akurẹ, Ẹfọn, and Ijẹṣa areas.
Southeast Yoruba
- Okitipupa, Ondo, Ọwọ, Ṣagamu, and parts of Ijẹbu.

Standard Yoruba

Standard Yoruba (also known as literary Yoruba, the Yoruba koiné, common Yoruba and often simply as Yoruba) is a separate member of the dialect cluster. It is the written form of the language, the standard variety accepted by most of the dialect speakers. Standard Yoruba has its origin in the 1850's, when Samuel A. Crowther, native Yoruba and the first African Bishop, published a Yoruba grammar and started his translation of the Bible. Though for a large part based on the Ọyọ and Ibadan dialects, Standard Yoruba incorporates several features from other dialects^[3]. Additionally, it has some features peculiar to itself only, for example the simplified vowel harmony system, as well as foreign structures, such as calques from English which originated in early translations of religious works.

Notably, the use of Standard Yoruba did not result from some deliberate linguistic policy and as a result, much controversy exists as to what constitutes 'genuine Yoruba'. Standard Yoruba has nonetheless been a powerful consolidating factor in the emergence of a common Yoruba identity.

Phonology

The three possible syllable structures of Yoruba are consonant+vowel (CV), vowel alone (V), and syllabic nasal (N). Every syllable bears one of the three tones: high ́, mid ̄ (generally left unmarked), and low ̀. The sentence 'n̄ ò lọ' I didn't go provides examples of the three syllable types:

n̄ — [ŋ̄] — I
ò — [ó] — not (negation)
lọ — [lɔ] — to go

Vowels

The vowel phonemes of Yoruba are:

	Oral vowels		Nasal vowels
	Front	Back	Front	Back
Close	i	u	ĩ	ũ
Close-mid	e	o
Open-mid	ɛ	ɔ	ɛ̃	ɔ̃
Open	a

The status of a fifth nasal vowel, [ã], is controversial. Although the sound does occur in speech, several authors have argued it to be not phonemically contrastive; often, it is in free variation with [ɔ̃].^[4] Ortographically, nasal vowels are represented by an oral vowel symbol followed by n, i.e. in, un, ẹn, ọn.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labial-velar	Glottal
Plosive	b		t d		ɟ	k g	k͡p g͡b
Nasal	m		(n)
Fricative		f	s	ʃ				h
Approximant			ɾ		j		w
Lateral approximant			l

Like many other languages of the region, Yoruba uses labial-velar stops /k͡p/ and /g͡b/, where stops are pronounced at both places of articulation simultaneously, and in fact lacks a simple voiceless bilabial plosive (p in English). Unusually, it also lacks a phoneme /n/; though the letter <n> is used for the sound in the orthography, it strictly speaking refers to an allophone of /l/ which immediately precedes a nasal vowel.

There is also a syllabic nasal, not shown on the above table, which forms a syllable nucleus by itself. When it precedes a vowel it is a velar nasal [ŋ]. In other cases its place of articulation is homorganic with the following consonant.

Before:	Pronounced:
b, m	m
f	ɱ
t, d, s, l, ɾ	n
ɟ, ʃ, j	ɲ
k, g, w, h, vowel	ŋ
k͡p, g͡b	ŋ͡m

Tone

The tonemes of Yoruba are:

Tone	As written over a	As written over syllabic n
High	á	ń
Mid	a	n̄
Low	à	ǹ

Writing system

Yoruba orthography originated in the early work of Crowther. In early translations of portions of the English Bible, Crowther used the Latin alphabet without tone markings. The only diacritic used was a dot below certain vowels to signify their open variants [ɛ] and [ɔ], viz. ẹ and ọ. Over the years the orthography was revised to take care of tone marking among other things. In 1875 the Church Missionary Society (CMS) organised a conference on Yoruba Orthography; the standard devised there was the basis for the orthography of the steady flow of religious and educational literature over the next seventy years.

The current orthography of Yoruba derives from Ayọ Bamgboṣe's 1965 Yoruba Orthography, a major reform of the earlier orthographies. It employs the Latin alphabet modified by the use of the digraph gb and certain diacritics, including the traditional vertical line set under the letters E̩/e̩, O̩/o̩, and S̩/s̩. In many publications the line is replaced by a dot (Ẹ/ẹ, Ọ/ọ, Ṣ/ṣ).

A

B

D

E

Ẹ

F

G

Gb

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

Ọ

P

R

S

Ṣ

T

U

W

Y

a

b

d

e

ẹ

f

g

gb

h

i

j

k

l

m

n

o

ọ

p

r

s

ṣ

t

u

w

y

The Latin letters c, q, v, x, z are not used.

The pronunciation of the letters without diacritics corresponds more or less to their International Phonetic Alphabet equivalents, except for the labial-velar stops kp͡ (written as /p/) and [gb͡] (written as /gb/), in which both consonants are pronounced simultaneously rather than sequentially. The diacritic underneath vowels indicates an open vowel, pronounced with the root of the tongue retracted (so e̩ is pronounced with an IPA [ɛ̙] and o̩ with an IPA [ɔ̙]). <s̩> represents a postalveolar consonant [ʃ] like the English sh, <y> represents a palatal approximant like English y, and <j> a voiced palatal plosive, as is common in many African orthographies.

Tone markings

In addition to the vertical bars, three further diacritics are used on vowels and syllabic nasal consonants to indicate the language's tones: an acute accent for the high tone, a grave accent for the low tone, and an optional macron for the middle tone. These are used in addition to the line in e̩ and o̩. When more than one tone is used in one syllable, the vowel can either be written once for each tone (for example, *òó for a vowel [o] with tone rising from low to high) or, more rarely in current usage, combined into a single accent. In this case, a caron is used for the rising tone (so the previous example would be written ǒ) and a tilde for other possibilities.

Á

À

Ā

É

È

Ē

Ẹ/E̩

Ẹ́/É̩

Ẹ̀/È̩

Ẹ̄/Ē̩

Í

Ì

Ī

Ó

Ò

Ō

Ọ/O̩

Ọ́/Ó̩

Ọ̀/Ò̩

Ọ̄/Ō̩

Ú

Ù

Ū

Ṣ/S̩

á

à

ā

é

è

ē

ẹ/e̩

ẹ́/é̩

ẹ̀/è̩

ẹ̄/ē̩

í

ì

ī

ó

ò

ō

ọ/o̩

ọ́/ó̩

ọ̀/ò̩

ọ̄/ō̩

ú

ù

ū

ṣ/s̩

Notes and references

Notes

^ Fagborun 1994:13.
^ This widely followed classification is based on Adetugbọ’s (1982) dialectological study — the classification originated in his 1967 PhD thesis The Yoruba Language in Western Nigeria: Its Major Dialect Areas.
^ Cf. for example the following remark by Adetugbọ (1967, as cited in Fagborun 1994:25): "While the orthography agreed upon by the missionaries represented to a very large degree the phonemes of the Abẹokuta dialect, the morpho-syntax reflected the Ọyọ-Ibadan dialects".
^ Notably, AyoŃ BamgbosŃe (1966:8).

References

Adetugbọ, Abiọdun (1982) 'Towards a Yoruba Dialectology', in Afọlayan (ed.) (1982) Yoruba Language and Literature, pp. 207-224.
Bamgboṣe, Ayọ (1965) Yoruba Orthography. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press.
Bamgboṣe, Ayọ (1966) A Grammar of Yoruba. [West African Languages Survey / Institute of African Studies]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crowther, Samual Ajayi (1852) Yoruba Grammar. London.
Fagborun, J. Gbenga (1994) The Yoruba Koiné – its History and Linguistic Innovations. LINCOM Linguistic Edition vol. 6. München/Newcastle: LINCOM Europe.
Fresco, Max (1970) Topics in Yoruba Dialect Phonology (Studies in African Linguistics Supplement Vol. 1). Los Angeles: University of California, Dept. of Linguistics/ASC.