Yoruba language
Èdè Yorùbá [jōrùbá]) is a Niger-Congo language that is spoken in West Africa, primarily in Southwestern and Central Nigeria, Benin, and parts of Togo.
[4] As a pluricentric language, it is primarily spoken in a dialectal area spanning Nigeria, Benin, and Togo with smaller migrated communities in Côte d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone and The Gambia.
For such practitioners, the Yoruba lexicon is especially common for ritual purposes, and these modern manifestations have taken new forms that do not depend on vernacular fluency.
The linguistic unity of the Niger–Congo family dates to deep pre-history, with estimates ranging around 11,000 years ago (the end of the Upper Paleolithic).
[12] In contrast to NWY, lineage, and descent are largely multilineal and cognatic, and the division of titles into war and civil is unknown.
SEY has collapsed the second and third-person plural pronominal forms; thus, àn án wá can mean either 'you (pl.)
Central Yoruba forms a transitional area in that the lexicon has much in common with NWY and shares many ethnographical features with SEY.
[13] It also has some features peculiar to itself, for example, the simplified vowel harmony system, as well as foreign structures, such as calques from English that originated in early translations of religious works.
The earliest documented history of the people, traced to the latter part of the 17th century, was in the Yoruba but in the Arabic script called Ajami.
However, the oldest extant Yoruba Ajami exemplar is a 19th-century Islamic verse (waka) by Badamasi Agbaji (d. 1895- Hunwick 1995).
In early grammar primers and translations of portions of the English Bible, Crowther used the Latin alphabet largely without tone markings.
Still similar to the older orthography, it employs the Latin alphabet modified by the use of the digraph ⟨gb⟩ and certain diacritics, including the underdots under the letters ⟨ẹ⟩, ⟨ọ⟩, and ⟨ṣ⟩.
Previously, the vertical line had been used to avoid the mark being fully covered by an underline, as in ⟨e̩⟩, ⟨o̩⟩, ⟨s̩⟩; however, that usage is no longer common.
In 2011, a Beninese priest-chief by the name of Tolúlàṣẹ Ògúntósìn devised a new script for Yoruba, based on a vision received in his sleep which he believed to have been granted by Oduduwa.
The sentence n̄ ò lọ (I didn't go) provides examples of three syllable types: Standard Yoruba has seven oral and five nasal vowels.
The rhotic consonant is realized as a flap [ɾ][22] or, in some varieties (notably Lagos Yoruba), as the alveolar approximant [ɹ] due to English influence.
[citation needed] Notably, it lacks a voiceless bilabial stop /p/, apart from phonaesthesia, such as [pĩpĩ] for vehicle horn sounds, and marginal segments found in recent loanwords, such as
[23] Yoruba also lacks a phoneme /n/; the letter ⟨n⟩ is used for the sound in the orthography, but strictly speaking, it refers to an allophone of /l/ immediately preceding a nasal vowel.
The language is transformed as speakers talk and whistle simultaneously: consonants are devoiced or turned to [h], and all vowels are changed to [u].
The Yoruba talking drum, the dùndún or iya ilu, which accompanies singing during festivals and important ceremonies, also uses tone.
Asubiaro Toluwase, in his 2014 paper,[27] points out that the use of these diacritics can affect the retrieval of Yoruba documents by popular search engines.
[28] Since syllables in Yoruba normally end in a vowel, and most nouns start with one, it is a widespread phenomenon, and it is absent only in slow, unnatural speech.
Most verbal roots are monosyllabic of the phonological shape CV(N), for example: dá 'to create', dán 'to polish', pọ́n 'to be red'.
The bare verb stem denotes a completed action, often called perfect; tense and aspect are marked by preverbal particles such as ń 'imperfect/present continuous', ti 'past'.
[35] Position and direction are expressed by the prepositions in combination with spatial relational nouns like orí 'top', apá 'side', inú 'inside', etí 'edge', abẹ́ 'under', ilẹ̀ 'down', etc.
The wide adoption of imported religions and civilizations such as Islam and Christianity has had an impact both on written and spoken Yoruba.
In his Arabic-English Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Quran and Sunnah, Yoruba Muslim scholar Abu-Abdullah Adelabu argued Islam has enriched African languages by providing them with technical and cultural augmentations with Swahili and Somali in East Africa and Turanci Hausa and Wolof in West Africa being the primary beneficiaries.
Adelabu, a Ph D graduate from Damascus cited—among many other common usages—the following words to be Yoruba's derivatives of Arabic vocabularies:[36][better source needed] Some common Arabic words used in Yoruba are names of the days such as Atalata (الثلاثاء) for Tuesday, Alaruba (الأربعاء) for Wednesday, Alamisi (الخميس) for Thursday, and Jimoh (الجمعة, Jumu'ah) for Friday.
[37][better source needed] Ultimately, the standard words for the days of the week are Àìkú, Ajé, Ìṣẹ́gun, Ọjọ́rú, Ọjọ́bọ, Ẹtì, Àbámẹ́ta, for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday respectively.
