Yoruba Language Guide

Official language in
Nigeria
Also spoken in
Benin
Script
Latin

Where it's spoken

Yoruba is spoken by the Yoruba people, mainly in Nigeria's southwestern region, where a language-classification database describes it as the de facto regional language. It is also spoken in neighboring Benin. Nigeria's constitution provides that the business of the National Assembly is conducted in English, and in Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, once adequate arrangements have been made for their use.

Sources

Script & pronunciation

Yoruba is written with the Latin alphabet, extended with three letters that carry a dot below — ẹ, ọ and ṣ — which are distinct letters from plain e, o and s. It is a tonal language: in the formal linguistic literature, Yorùbá tone is described with a three-level pitch-height paradigm of low, mid and high, and the World Atlas of Language Structures codes its tone system as complex, meaning it involves more contrasts than the two-way high/low distinction found in languages with a simple tone system. This app's cards describe Yoruba as having three tones — high, marked with an acute accent; low, marked with a grave accent; and mid, left unmarked — as in Kò yé mi ("I don't understand"), where kò carries a grave accent, yé an acute accent, and mi no mark at all.

Sources

Grammar essentials

Yoruba's basic word order is subject–verb–object, as in this app's card Mo fẹ́ jẹun ("I want to eat"), where the subject mo ("I") is followed by the verb fẹ́ ("want") and the verb jẹun ("eat"). In the noun phrase, modifiers follow the noun rather than precede it: this app's card for cold water gives omi tútù, literally "water cold," and its own grammar note explains that Yoruba has no adjective agreement or case marking, so word order alone carries the relation between words. Negation places the negative morpheme before the verb: this app's card for "I can't speak Yorùbá," Mi ò gbọ Yorùbá, is glossed in its own grammar note as placing ò directly before the verb gbọ ("to hear/understand/speak").

Sources

Politeness & etiquette

Yoruba marks a binary politeness distinction in its second-person pronoun: a cross-linguistic database of pronoun systems codes Yoruba as using its second-person-plural subject pronoun, ẹ, for polite address to a superior, an elder, or someone of higher status. This app's cards follow the same pattern: its card for "thank you very much" explains that Ẹ ṣé is the respectful or plural "thank you," with o ṣé as the singular and familiar form, and calls using ẹ with elders and higher-status people essential Yoruba etiquette. Its card for the adjective "old (person)" gives Àgbà, described as honoring an older person and usable as a form of address.

Sources

Browse all TravelPhrases languages