Language: Section Index

The language section covers Yorùbá as a language: how it works, how it came to be written, what its words mean and where they came from, its major oral literary forms, and how English translation of it was shaped by the missionary encounter. Ten files, roughly 30,000 words.

Two files carry more weight than the others. translation-and-bias (08) is the methodological centre of the section and arguably of the corpus, because it documents how the English vocabulary for Yorùbá religion was manufactured and how to read older sources without absorbing their assumptions. yoruba-etymology-and-word-formation (04) is the file that separates documented etymology from folk etymology, and it is the one to consult before trusting any confident claim about what a Yorùbá word "really" means.

The files

#	File	One-line summary
01	The Yorùbá Language: Family, Dialects, and Speakers	Where Yorùbá sits in the Niger-Congo family, the dialect continuum from Ọ̀yọ́ to Ondó, how Standard Yorùbá was constructed on an Ọ̀yọ́ base, and what the speaker numbers and vitality data actually show.
02	Sounds and Tone: How Yorùbá Means	The seven vowels, eighteen consonants, and three tones, with fully worked minimal pairs showing how pitch alone distinguishes words, plus downstep, vowel harmony, and why Mid tone is the hardest.
03	Writing Yorùbá: Ajami, Crowther, and the Orthography Committees	From Arabic-script Ajami through Crowther and the 1875 Lagos conference to the Bamgbóṣé committees of 1966 and 1974, why subdots and tone marks are structural rather than decorative, and the Unicode problems that break Yorùbá text online.
04	How Yorùbá Builds Meaning: Word Formation and Etymology	Prefixation, compounding, incorporation, and the sentence-as-word pattern, then confidence-rated etymologies for Ifá, òrìṣà, babaláwo, Olódùmarè, Ọlọ́run, àṣẹ, orí, ìwà, àyànmọ́, oríkì, odù, and Èṣù, with widespread false etymologies named and corrected.
05	Òwe: Proverbs and the Architecture of Yorùbá Argument	What proverbs do socially, rhetorically, and in adjudication, and forty-three proverbs in full three-layer translation with commentary on the metaphor, including a tonal pun English cannot carry.
06	Oríkì: Praise Poetry, Genealogy, and the Naming of Essence	The genres of praise poetry, why women hold and perform this knowledge, how oríkì encode lineage and history, and what their real limits are as historical evidence.
07	Orúkọ: Yorùbá Names and How They Are Given	Names as compressed sentences, the birth-circumstance names you do not choose, the àbíkú names, the ìsọmọlórúkọ ceremony, and a worked list of common names with literal meanings and recurring elements.
08	Translation and Bias: How English Learned to Talk About Yorùbá Religion	Who actually translated the Yorùbá Bible, what Crowther's 1852 dictionary literally says about Èṣù and òrìṣà, where the popular Èṣù-Satan account gets its facts wrong, the colonial origins of "fetish" and "juju", and a method for reading older sources.
09	Written Yorùbá: Print, Novel, Theatre, Film, and the Language Now	Ìwé Ìròhìn and the Yorùbá press, Fágúnwà and the first Yorùbá novel, the argument about Tutuola, Ogunde and Duro Ládipọ̀'s theatre, Yorùbá film, and the November 2025 reversal of Nigeria's mother-tongue education policy.
10	Starting to Read Yorùbá: A Practical Guide for Adults	A step-by-step route into reading tone-marked Yorùbá for someone who already speaks it, with greetings, core vocabulary, keyboards, named free resources with links, and a realistic plan.

Suggested reading orders

If you want to start reading Yorùbá: 10, then 02, then 03. File 10 gives the plan, 02 explains the tones it asks you to learn, and 03 explains why the marks exist.

If you are working through the demonization question: 08 first, then 04, then 03. File 08 documents what happened, 04 shows how to test etymological claims, and 03 gives the history of the writing system that carried it.

If you want the intellectual depth of the tradition: 05, then 06, then 04. Proverbs and praise poetry are where Yorùbá thought is most densely worked, and 04 gives the vocabulary.

If you want the linguistics: 01, 02, 04.

What this section does not cover

Cosmology, the meaning of orí, àṣẹ, ìwà, and àyànmọ́ as concepts rather than as words, belongs to 04-cosmology. The Ifá divination system, the structure of the 256 odù, and the training of babaláwo belong to 05-ifa. The òrìṣà individually belong to 06-orisa. This section treats all of these only as linguistic objects: what the words are, where they came from, and how they have been translated.

Several matters are flagged in these files as unresolved rather than answered, and they stay that way deliberately: the origin of the word Ifá, the origin of the ethnonym Yorùbá, whether Ọlọ́run was promoted by the missions, and whether Idowu's Olódùmarè is a description of pre-Christian Yorùbá belief or partly a construction of it. Where knowledge is initiate-held, particularly the interpretation of individual odù, this section says so rather than filling the gap.