Concept
Yoruba language
Overview
Yoruba (US: , UK: ; Yor. Èdè Yorùbá [èdè jōɾùbá]) is an Atlantic–Congo language that is spoken in West Africa, primarily in South West Nigeria, Benin, and parts of Togo. It is spoken by the Yoruba people. Yoruba speakers number roughly 50 million, including around 2 million second-language or L2 speakers. 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 Gambia.
Yoruba vocabulary is also used in African diaspora religions such as the Afro-Brazilian religions of Candomblé and Umbanda, the Caribbean religion of Santería in the form of the liturgical Lucumí language, and various Afro-American religions of North America. Among modern practitioners of these religions in the Americas, Yoruba is a liturgical language, as most of them are not fluent in it, yet they still use Yoruba words and phrases for songs or chants, which are rooted in cultural traditions. 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.
As the principal Yoruboid language, Yoruba is most closely related to Itsekiri (spoken in the Niger Delta) and Igala (spoken in central Nigeria).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite useless. It is not the hearing of the word, but its accompanying intonation that is understood. To the language of intonation is added the no less forcible language of gesture. The child uses, not its weak hands, but its face…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
States what Yoruba language is.
This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Yoruba language is.
And this indeed is the opinion of the Jews themselves, who assert that KERUB is a Chaldaic term and that the letter _Kappa_ is a servile letter, and that RUB signifies a beautiful youth, who has a full and florid face; and they affirm that the angels are called KERUBIM, as representing their florid and joyful and delightful countenance or appearance; and thus they are generally represented in paintings. In like…
Martin Luther, Commentary on Genesis, Vol. 1
States what Yoruba language is.
Related ideas
- Grammatical gender
- Hausa language
- Circumflex
- Latin alphabet
- Latin America
- Yoruba people
- North America
- Niger–Congo languages
- Orthography
- Phoneme
- East Africa
- Swahili
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Digraph (orthography)
- West Africa
- Cambridge University Press
Place in the tradition
Part of Language.