Yoruba Language - Writing System

Writing System

In the 17th century Yoruba was written in the Ajami script, a form of Arabic. Modern Yoruba orthography originated in the early work of CMS missionaries working among the Aku (Yoruba) of Freetown. One of their informants was Crowther, who later would proceed to work on his native language himself. 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 and, viz. ‹ẹ› and ‹ọ›. Over the years the orthography was revised to represent tone 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›, ‹o̩›, and ‹s̩›. In many publications the line is replaced by a dot ‹ẹ›, ‹ọ›, ‹ṣ›. The vertical line had been used to avoid the mark being fully covered by an underline.

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 (written ‹p›) and (written ‹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 ‹ẹ› is pronounced and ‹ọ› is ). ‹ṣ› represents a postalveolar consonant 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 ‹ẹ› and ‹ọ›. 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 ‹ˇ› is used for the rising tone (so the previous example would be written ‹ǒ›) and a circumflex ‹ˆ› for a the falling tone.

In Benin, Yoruba uses a different orthography. The Yoruba alphabet was standardized along with other Benin languages in the National Languages Alphabet by the National Language Commission in 1975, and revised in 1980 by the National Center for Applied Linguistics.