Written Yorùbá: Print, Novel, Theatre, Film, and the Language Now

Yorùbá has a printed literature going back to 1850 and a continuous tradition of Yorùbá-language novels, newspapers, theatre, and film. This is worth stating plainly because a reader who was taught that Yorùbá culture is oral-only, and therefore somehow less developed, was taught something false. The first book printed in Yorùbá appeared in 1850, the first newspaper in 1859, and the first Yorùbá novel in 1938 123.

What is true, and more interesting, is that this written tradition grew directly out of the missionary encounter, since the presses, the orthography, and the first generation of literate Yorùbá were all products of it, and that the greatest Yorùbá-language writer used those tools to write books saturated with the oral and spiritual material the missions were trying to displace.

The press

Ìwé Ìròhìn, established by the CMS missionary Henry Townsend at Abẹ́òkúta, first appeared on 3 December 1859 and ran until 1867 2. Its full title was Ìwé Ìròhìn fún àwọn ará Ẹ̀gbá àti Yorùbá, the newspaper for the Ẹ̀gbá people and the Yorùbá 2. It was published every fourteen days, ran to about eight pages, and sold for 120 cowries 2. It is Nigeria's first newspaper and the first indigenous-language newspaper in West Africa, and by 1866 it was appearing in both Yorùbá and English, making it the first bilingual newspaper in Africa 2.

Its purpose was initially religious, easing the teaching of Christianity, and Townsend was a missionary 2. It quickly became more than that, carrying commercial notices, local news, and reporting that fed a growing Ẹ̀gbá public sphere.

A Yorùbá-language press has continued since, including titles such as Ìròhìn Yorùbá and Àlàáròyè, alongside Yorùbá radio and television broadcasting, which is one of the reasons Ethnologue classifies the language's vitality as institutional. Yorùbá-language print has nonetheless contracted relative to English-language media over the last several decades.

D. O. Fágúnwà and the Yorùbá novel

Daniel Olorunfẹmi Fágúnwà (1903-1963) is the central figure of written Yorùbá literature. His first novel, Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀, was published by the Church Missionary Society Bookshop in Lagos in 1938 and is the first novel written in Yorùbá 3. It follows the hunter Àkàrà-Ògùn through a forest of spirits and divinities.

Fágúnwà's novels take the form of loosely constructed picaresque narratives full of folklore material: spirits, monsters, divinities, magic 3. He wrote in Yorùbá, for Yorùbá readers, using the missionary orthography and a missionary press, and his books are morally framed in a way consistent with his own Christianity while being built almost entirely from the Yorùbá spirit world. That combination is the thing to notice: the medium was mission-supplied and the content was indigenous.

The novel was translated into English by Wọlé Ṣóyinká in 1968 as Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga 3. Ṣóyinká's translator's note explains that "a thousand" in English carries the sound and sense that four hundred carries in Yorùbá, which is a precise illustration of what the three-layer translation rule in this corpus is for: irúnmalẹ̀ refers to the four hundred divinities, and a literal "four hundred" would be numerically accurate and rhetorically wrong 3.

Fágúnwà's other major works include Igbó Olódùmarè (The Forest of Olódùmarè), Ìrèké Oníbùdó, Ìrìnkèrindò nínú Igbó Elégbèje, and Àdììtú Olódùmarè. He remains widely read in Yorùbá-medium schools.

Because his work was in Yorùbá and untranslated until after his death, Fágúnwà's international reputation lagged behind that of writers who wrote in English, and this is a general pattern for African-language literature rather than a fact about his quality 3.

Amos Tutuola and the argument about him

Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) published The Palm-Wine Drinkard in London in 1952, in English, and it made him internationally famous and domestically controversial 4.

The book narrates a quest into the land of the dead in a distinctive non-standard English that follows Yorùbá sentence structure and idiom. Western critics, led by an early laudatory review from Dylan Thomas, praised its unconventional English, its closeness to oral tradition, and its invention 4.

Nigerian critics largely disliked it, for two reasons worth separating 4.

The first was linguistic and reputational. Tutuola's English was ungrammatical by school standards, and with independence approaching, educated Nigerians objected that his work would be taken as representative of Nigerian literary capacity, and that his world of spirits was exactly the image of the country they wanted retired from global perception 4.

The second was the charge of unoriginality: that Tutuola's material was drawn from Yorùbá oral tradition and was unduly similar to Fágúnwà, who had done the same thing earlier, in Yorùbá, and better 4.

The critical judgment has shifted since. Tutuola is now generally credited with founding a distinctively African literary form, and his blending of Yorùbá syntax with English vocabulary is read as producing original effects rather than as failed English 4. The comparison with Fágúnwà is usually framed as a difference of position rather than of quality: Tutuola's stories read as if caught at the moment of crystallisation out of oral tradition, while Fágúnwà had already moved past that point into a self-conscious literary structure 3.

For this corpus the useful point is what the Tutuola argument was actually about. It was a dispute among Yorùbá and Nigerian intellectuals about whether the oral and spiritual inheritance was an embarrassment to be outgrown or a resource to be worked with. That argument is the same one the reader of this corpus is likely conducting internally, and it was live in Lagos in 1952.

Theatre

Yorùbá theatre has deep roots in the aláàrìnjó masquerade performance tradition, and its modern form emerged in the twentieth century as the Yorùbá travelling theatre, whose golden age ran from the early 1950s to the early 1980s 5.

Hubert Ogunde (1916-1990) is generally called the father of contemporary Yorùbá theatre and of Nigerian theatre more broadly 5. He began with what were called operas, staging The Garden of Eden and the Throne of God successfully in 1944, and went on to write more than fifty plays combining dramatic action, dance, and music, with stories engaging the political and social conditions of the time 5. His companies toured, and his work was politically pointed enough to attract colonial and later government attention.

Duro Ládipọ̀ (1931-1978) came to theatre from church music composition and wrote historical and cultural plays intended to preserve traditional art 5. His best-known work is Ọba Kò So (The King Did Not Hang), a music drama on the death and deification of Ṣàngó, along with Ọba Mọ́rò and Ẹdá, a Yorùbá reworking of the morality play Everyman 5. Ọba Kò So toured internationally and is the single most influential Yorùbá-language stage work.

The scholarly literature is thin but real: Biodun Jeyifo's The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria (1984) is the standard study, and Karin Barber has written extensively on the tradition 5.

The travelling theatre companies moved into film and then video as the economics changed, which is the direct ancestry of the Yorùbá-language film industry.

Film

Yorùbá-language cinema is one of the largest film industries in Africa by output. Ogunde and other travelling theatre figures made the transition to celluloid from the 1970s, and the collapse of cinema exhibition in the 1980s pushed production to video, which is the origin of the industry now generally called Nollywood, whose Yorùbá-language wing remains a distinct and large sector.

Yorùbá film has become, in practice, the most significant vehicle for Yorùbá-language content by audience size, reaching far more people than Yorùbá print does. It is also now a linguistic resource in its own right: researchers have built the first Yorùbá sentiment corpus from Nollywood movie reviews, and the NollySenti parallel corpus covers Yorùbá among five Nigerian languages 6.

The language of these films is worth noting as evidence about the state of Yorùbá: heavy code-switching with English is normal in contemporary production, which reflects ordinary urban speech rather than a decline in production standards.

Where the language stands now

Education, and a very recent reversal

This is the most consequential current development, and it is recent enough that many sources have not caught up.

Nigeria adopted a National Language Policy in 2022 requiring indigenous languages to be the medium of instruction for the first six years of schooling, with associated curriculum development, materials, and teacher training 7.

On 12 November 2025, the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, announced at the 2025 Language in Education Conference in Abuja that the policy was reversed, making English the sole language of instruction at all levels 7. The reversal had been adopted at the 69th National Council of Education in Akure on 3-7 November 2025 7. The minister cited high failure rates and students' difficulties with English comprehension, and stated that using mother tongue instruction over the past fifteen years had, in his words, destroyed education in certain regions 7.

The reversal was opposed by linguists and cultural bodies. Andrew Haruna, president of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, argued that to sever learners from their mother tongue is to impoverish their intellectual potential, and the Linguistic Association of Nigeria launched a petition against the decision, raising concerns about educational equity for rural and indigenous communities 7.

This sits within a much older pattern. The British colonial Education Ordinance of 1882 restricted government funding to schools teaching in English, which began the displacement of Nigerian languages from formal education 7. The 2025 decision continues a line that runs back to it.

Yorùbá remains taught as a subject at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, and is studied and examined as a discipline in Nigerian universities. The change concerns the medium of instruction, not the existence of Yorùbá teaching.

Yorùbá online and in language technology

Yorùbá is classified as a low-resource language in natural language processing despite having tens of millions of speakers, which is a statement about available annotated data rather than about the language 8.

A systematic review of 105 primary studies published between 2014 and 2024 identifies the main obstacles as the scarcity of annotated corpora, the limited availability of pre-trained language models, and linguistic challenges specific to Yorùbá, namely tonal complexity and diacritic dependency 8. The review also names socio-cultural constraints, including code-switching and what it describes as the desertion of the language for digital usage 8.

The diacritic problem is the practical bottleneck and is treated in yoruba-orthography: most Yorùbá text online is written in plain ASCII without tone marks or subdots, which makes it ambiguous for machines in the same way it is ambiguous for human readers 9.

Work is nonetheless active and much of it is African-led. Masakhane is a grassroots NLP community for Africa, by Africans, and its MasakhaNER dataset was the first large high-quality named-entity dataset for African languages with substantial Yorùbá coverage 6. Automatic diacritic restoration for Yorùbá now achieves error rates below five percent, with models and datasets released openly 9. Yorùbá is included in an increasing number of multilingual models.

The honest summary

Yorùbá is a large language with institutional support, a 175-year print tradition, a major film industry, university departments, and active language technology work. It is not endangered.

At the same time, its formal educational role has just been reduced by government decision, urban middle-class transmission to children is weakening, and a great many fluent speakers cannot read or write it comfortably because tone-marked orthography was never taught to them. Those are different problems from endangerment, and they respond to different remedies, mostly individual and family-level rather than governmental. learning-yoruba-resources addresses what an individual can actually do.