How Strong Yoruba language is....

Yoruba is a Western Langauage Spoken Mostly Widely in Nigeria... Come to think of this, Y is it that, Hip-Hop WORLD has also adpoted the Yoruba Langauge.... into it.... even my friends from other nation in the World Confirms that Yoruba is the Easiet, and Sweetest Language to Learn, it is even spoken by some igbos, hausa, that is to show how easy and comfortable it is.

Another thing is durin SSCE, Statistic shows 98% of Student will rather take a Yoruba Class and Sit for a Yoruba Exam in their SSCE rather than their own Language.

With Reference From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,

Yoruba (native name èdè Yorùbá, 'the Yoruba language') is a dialect continuum of West Africa with over 25 million speakers.[1] The native tongue of the approximately 28 million Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and traces of it are found among communities in Brazil,[2] Sierra Leone (where it is called Oku), northern Ghana (where it is spoken by urban migrant Yoruba communities alongside Hausa and local languages) and Cuba[3] (where it is called Nago). Yoruba is an isolating, tonal language with SVO syntax. Apart from referring to the aggregate of dialects and their speakers, the term Yoruba is used for the standard, written form of the language. Yoruba is classified as a Niger-Congo language of the Yoruboid branch of Defoid, Benue-Congo. Yoruba is the third most spoken native African language.

The traditional Yoruba area - currently comprising the southwestern portion of Nigeria, the republics of Benin and Togo - is commonly called Ìlẹ-Yorùbá or Yorubaland. The Nigeria component comprises today's Ọyọ, Ọsun, Ogun, Ondo, Ekiti, Kwara, and Lagos states as well as the western part of Kogi state. Geophysically, Yorubaland forms part of a plateau (elevation 366 m) bordered to the north and east by the Niger River. A large part of it is densely forested; the northern part however, including Ọyọ, lies in the savanna to the north of the forest.

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 of the nineteenth century that the children of Oduduwa share one name. Before the abolition of the slave trade, Yorubas among the liberated slaves in Freetown 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’. At some stage the term Yariba or Yoruba came into use, first confined to the Ọyọ Kingdom; the term was used among the Hausa (as it is today) but its origins are unclear. Under the influence of the Yoruba Samuel Ajayi Crowther, (first Bishop of West Africa and first African bishop of the Church of England, who was a war captive freed on the high seas en-route to slavery) 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. The Yoruba have and sometimes continue to be referred to as the Anago, Nago and Lucumi.


Linguistic means —including, for example, historical-comparative linguistics, glottochronology, and dialectology — used along with both traditional (oral) historical sources and archaeological finds, have shed some light on the history of the Yorubas and their language before this point. The North-West Yoruba dialects, for example, show more linguistic innovations. According to some, this, combined with the fact that Southeast and Central Yoruba areas generally have older settlements, suggests a later date of immigration for Northwest Yoruba.

Dialects

The Yoruba dialect continuum itself consists of various dialects. The various Yoruba dialects in the Yorubaland of Nigeria can be classified into three major dialect areas: Northwest, Central, and Southeast. Of course, clear boundaries can never be drawn and peripheral areas of dialectal regions often have some similarities to adjoining dialects.

    * North-West Yoruba (NWY).
          o Abẹokuta, Ibadan, Ọyọ, Ọgun and Lagos areas
    * Central Yoruba (CY)
          o Igbomina, Ifẹ, Ekiti, Iworoko Ekiti, Akurẹ, Ẹfọn, and Ijẹbu areas.
    * South-East Yoruba (SEY)
          o Okitipupa, Ondo, Ọwọ, Ikare, Sagamu, and parts of Ijẹbu.

North-West Yoruba is historically a part of the Ọyọ empire. In NWY dialects, Proto-Yoruba /gh/ (the velar fricative [ɣ]) and /gw/ have merged into /w/; the upper vowels /i ̣/ and /ụ/ were raised and merged with /i/ and /u/, just as their nasal counterparts, resulting in a vowel system with seven oral and three nasal vowels. Ethnographically, traditional government is based on a division of power between civil and war chiefs; lineage and descent are unilineal and agnatic.

South-East Yoruba was probably associated with the expansion of the Benin Empire after c. 1450 AD. In contrast to NWY, lineage and descent are largely multilineal and cognatic, and the division of titles into war and civil is unknown. Linguistically, SEY has retained the /gh/ and /gw/ contrast, while it has lowered the nasal vowels /ịn/ and /ụn/ to /ẹn/ and /ọn/, respectively. SEY has collapsed the second and third person plural pronominal forms; thus, àn án wá can mean either 'you (pl.) came' or 'they came' in SEY dialects, whereas NWY for example has ẹ wá 'you (pl.) came' and wọ́n wá 'they came', respectively. The emergence of a plural of respect may have prevented coalescence of the two in NWY dialects.

Central Yoruba forms a transitional area in that the lexicon has much in common with NWY, whereas it shares many ethnographical features with SEY. Its vowel system is the least innovating of the three dialect groups, having retained nine oral-vowel contrasts and six or seven nasal vowels, and an extensive vowel harmony system.


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 learnt at school and that spoken by newsreaders on the radio. Standard Yoruba has its origin in the 1850s, 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. 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.

Because the use of Standard Yoruba did not result from some deliberate linguistic policy, much controversy exists as to what constitutes 'genuine Yoruba', with some writers holding the opinion that the Ọyọ dialect is the most "pure" form, and others stating that there is no such thing as genuine Yoruba at all. Standard Yoruba, the variety learnt at school and used in the media, has nonetheless been a powerful consolidating factor in the emergence of a common Yoruba identity.



Writing system

In the 17th century Yoruba was written in the Ajami script. Modern Yoruba orthography originated in the early work of CMS missionaries working among the Aku in Freetown, notably Kilham and Raban. They assembled vocabularies and published short notes on Yoruba grammar. One of their informants in Sierra Leone was Crowther, who later would proceed to study his native language Yoruba. In early grammar primers and translations of portions of the English Bible, Crowther used the Latin alphabet largely 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 a 1966 report of the Yoruba Orthography Committee, along with Ayọ Bamgboṣe's 1965 Yoruba Orthography, a study of the earlier orthographies and an attempt to bring Yoruba orthography in line with actual speech as much as possible. Still largely similar to the older orthography, 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). The vertical line has been used to avoid the mark being fully covered by an underline.
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 k͡p (written as <p>) and [g͡b] (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 [ɛ̙] and o̩ as [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.

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

• 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




However, to read more of the article log on to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_language

Posted: at 10-03-2009 07:35 PM (15 years ago) | Upcoming

I'm American and am endeavoring to learn Yoruba, this is encouraging to know.

Posted: at 4-05-2009 10:12 PM (14 years ago) | Upcoming