Ajami to Standard Yoruba

 
 
 
A standard or centrally adopted Yoruba did not begin until 1830-50, when the Church Missionary Society (CMS), spearheaded education in Yoruba land; the early beneficiary was Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Ajayi, along with family members (mother and younger brother) was captured by the Fulani army that attacked Oṣoogun, his village; Ajayi changed hands twice as a slave boy, but was set free in Freetown, Sierra-Leone. Crowther was educated at Fourah Bay College, Freetown and England by the Church. He played very uncommon role in the CMS ecclesiology, and was well-known for his proselytism in the whole Niger region of Nigeria. The unusual vigor demonstrated by Ajayi, his love for evangelism which was marked by distinction made the Church of England appointed Samuel Ajayi Crowther as the first African Bishop.

Ajayi Crowther had studied Latin, Greek, and (Temme); as a linguist, his first assignment was to reduce Yoruba language into letters and symbols for writing to be possible. He was successful, twenty-five letters emerged (25); eighteen (18) consonants and seven vowels. He introduced the dotted (Ọ and Ẹ) into Yoruba letters, translated some parts of the Bible into Yoruba and also published the Anglican book of prayer for the Church. He compiled the first Yoruba Dictionary; earlier in 1843, he published Yoruba Grammar-a precursor to many grammar books on Yoruba. In carrying out this assignment, Ajayi Crowther followed the general principles of writing system, which require: defined symbols or characters (with accompanied sound), defined orthography in terms of writing words with proper letters based on the general use by native speakers, phonology, the word sound; semantic and pragmatic-conveying meanings of both the individual word singly or in a context. Finally, syntax- constructing structures within the framwork of grammar.

Picture 1: Translation of the Bible into Yoruba in Mid 19th Century Marked a Turning Point in Yoruba History and the Language

Source: freemaninstitute.com with permission

No doubt, Bishop Crowther set the pace for what standard Yoruba language would be in years to come. Ajayi Crowther began Yoruba codification, by developing a writing system within the framework of rules of grammar, orthography, pronunciation, syntax and vocabulary. The Church, like the bishop also played a prominent  role in standardizing Yoruba, in 1875, the Church organized a conference on Yoruba Orthography. The Conference opened ways on how to write and to document in Yoruba, and the outcome of this conference served as a reference point for subsequent conferences and study groups on Yoruba language for many years to come.

One of such study groups was the “Yoruba Orthography Committee of 1966” which harmonized the findings of Bamgbose in 1965, and came up with new Yoruba phonemes and morphemes.

Like Crowther, the Yoruba Committee adopted the Latin letters, but went some steps further by incorporating digraph (that’s a pair of characters use to represent a single sound like “gb” Osogbo, Ogbomoso, Gbolagunte, Gbolahan, Gbolaga, Igbagbọ) into our phoneme. The Committee also included “diacritics” or glyph (otherwise known as Accent/Marks) which is placed on top of vowel letters to give specific meaning to a context.

Yoruba has three of these diacritics, there are: 

The committee adopted and included the vertical line dot under letters (Ọ and Ẹ) and consonant letter (Ṣ) and retained the 25 letters- which comes in two ways the majuscule (upper case/capital letters) and minuscule (lower case/small letters).

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.

These letters are made up of eighteen consonants and seven vowels, the basic blocks for word formation, words- the essential materials for speech making and writing. Nevertheless, these letters are, but working tools, should we go by phonetics or speech sound as defined by Webster Dictionary as “any of the set of distinctive sound of a given language, any audible, element, acoustics event occurring in speech, or any of the sound in entire phonetic system of a language” certainly, Yoruba will have more than 18 consonants and seven vowels.