Yorùbá

Yorùbá is spoken mainly in south-western Nigeria, across states such as Lagos, Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ondo, Ekiti and Kwara, and by long-established communities in Benin and Togo, as well as in Brazil, Cuba and other parts of the Americas through the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. It is one of Nigeria's three major regional languages, used in state and federal broadcasting, taught in schools as a subject and, in some southwestern states, as a medium of early primary instruction, and prominent in film through Yorùbá-language 'Nollywood' cinema and stage traditions such as Yoruba travelling theatre. Yorùbá is tonal, with three level tones marked in careful writing, and has substantial dialect variation, including Ọyọ, Ẹ̀gbá, Ìjẹ̀bú, Ifẹ̀, Ìlàjẹ and Ọ̀ndó varieties; a standard form based largely on Ọyọ-Ìbàdàn speech is used in print, broadcasting and education. It has a rich oral literature of proverbs, praise poetry (oríkì) and Ifá divination verse, and is widely used in religious life, including within Yorùbá traditional religion, Christianity and Islam. It continues to be transmitted strongly within Nigeria, though use among diaspora youth is more variable.

Yorùbá is written in a Latin-based orthography developed chiefly by Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the nineteenth century and later refined by Yorùbá scholars. It uses subdots to mark distinct vowel and consonant qualities not found in English, giving the letters ẹ, ọ and ṣ, and uses acute, grave and (for mid tone, often omitted) unmarked accents to show the three tones, as in á (high), à (low) and a (mid). Digraphs such as gb and the letter ṣ represent sounds absent from standard English spelling. A twentieth-century standardisation process, formalised through Yorùbá orthography committees, settled the current spelling conventions used in education and publishing, though tone marking is frequently simplified or omitted in informal writing such as text messages and social media.