Ṣàwárí

Guide to the ten files in the language section, covering the Yorùbá language itself, its sound and tone system, writing, etymology, proverbs, praise poetry, names, translation bias, literature, and learning resources.

What Yorùbá is as a language, which languages it is related to, how its dialects vary across Yorùbáland, and how many people speak it today.

How much of generically African-diasporic music, food, language and aesthetics is specifically Yoruba-derived, separating demonstrated retention from plausible resemblance and naming the overclaims common in popular writing.

In Yoruba, pitch is not accent, it is spelling. Three words can share every letter and differ only in tone, which is why stripping tone marks from a text is closer to deleting vowels than to dropping an accent mark.