Yoruba

The Yoruba homeland covers the southwestern Nigerian states of Lagos, Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Ekiti, and parts of Kogi and Kwara. Yoruba is also spoken in Benin and Togo. Ritual Yoruba — embedded in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian religious traditions — survives in liturgical use across Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad, and the African diaspora more broadly, though it's no longer used as a daily spoken language outside Africa.

Three: high (marked with acute, e.g. á), mid (unmarked), and low (marked with grave, e.g. à). Tones are part of every word, and the same syllable changes meaning entirely depending on tone (igbá: calabash; ìgbà: time, period; igba: 200; ìgbá: garden egg). The standardized Latin-based writing system marks tone with diacritics, though informal text often omits them.

Modern Yoruba is written in a Latin-based alphabet with diacritics for tone (á, à) and subdots for vowels and consonants pronounced differently from their unmarked Latin counterparts (ẹ, ọ, ṣ). Older Yoruba was written in a script called Ajami, an adapted Perso-Arabic script used in Islamic religious contexts. The Latin script with diacritics has been standard for general use since the 19th century.

No. Pronouns and verbs are gender-neutral. The third-person singular pronoun ó covers he, she, and it. Like many West African languages, Yoruba marks number and emphasis through pronoun choice but not gender. Family relationships and honorifics are encoded through other strategies, including specific kinship terms.

Stable but under pressure. Yoruba is one of the most-spoken languages in Nigeria with strong literary and broadcast traditions. However, urban younger generations increasingly use English in mixed contexts, and Yoruba transmission to children has weakened in some upper-middle-class urban families. Active Yoruba-language education, broadcasting, and digital culture continue to support the language.