M m

ª ¸ 

Ð ð

« ¹ 

N n

Ý ý 

Ñ ñ

Þ þ

To keep things simple, this is probably all the average student of Yoruba needs to know about the basic Yoruba alphabet and its ‘extended’ characters. It is also pertinent to note that the letters Ç ç, Ô ô and ß ÿ are not universally available in the character repertoire of computers. This is the main reason for the difficulty in rendering Yoruba text correctly and complete with all the required diacritics. This makes it necessary to have special font software to provide for this deficiency. 

However, for the sake of completeness, there are also historical aspects of the development of Yoruba orthography that needs to be addressed. This requires the availability of the appropriate characters that have been or continues to be used in Yoruba text. These have to be provided for in any font software that can boast of having the complete character repertoire of the Yoruba language.

The mid-tone mark on regular vowels.

According to convention, the mid tone is usually unmarked in Yoruba text when the high or low tones are marked. However, it is sometimes necessary, at the discretion of an author for clarity of meaning, to indicate the mid tone on regular vowels when all the syllables of a word are pronounced with the mid tone.  It may be necessary to clarify ‘’ as opposed to ‘àwo’.

The mid tone is represented with a macron.

Although we have said that there are three basic pitches with which Yoruba words are pronounced, in practice spoken Yoruba does not adhere totally to this condition. It is instructive to note here that a time-honored method of appreciating Yoruba intonation has been to liken the sound to the three musical tones ‘do – re – mi’. ‘Do’ is the low pitch sound, ‘re’ is mid tone and ‘mi’ is the high pitch.

Low-rising tone (assimilated low tone)

 A full discussion of this phenomenon is not intended here, but suffice it to say that my reading of the decision of the Yoruba Orthography Committee is that it remains inconclusive. Many authors continue to use the ‘low-rising’ tone mark  in their writing   I particularly prefer to write my own family name as Ônäyçmí rather than distorting it by doubling the ‘a’

A word of caution; the ‘tilde’.

 Current accepted Yoruba Orthography has done away with the use of the tilde to indicate a combination of tones in some words where this situation exists.  The words in question are now written with a doubling of the vowel and application of distinct tone marks to each vowel. An example is the word ‘»rùn’ which may stand for either “smell” or “sun”. Writing it as ‘òórùn’ for ‘smell’ and ‘oòrùn’ for ‘sun’ to make their meaning clear and unambiguous. Extant Yoruba texts with the tilde in use abound. It is instructive for the Yoruba student to be aware of this, and useful for the typeface to represent the tilde to continue to be available for academic discourse.

References:  Orthographies of Nigerian Languages Manual I

Editor: Professor Ayô Bamgboÿe

Special Note

It was pointed out earlier that the two conventions of appending an ‘under-bar’ or ‘dot’ to the letters ‘e’ ‘o’ and ‘s’ to form a different and distinct set of letters of the Yoruba alphabet are both acceptable in Yoruba orthography. Individual Yoruba language authors have a preference for one or the other and an academic discussion of the merits of that choice is beyond the scope of this writing. It is however instructive to note that this situation has profound implications for the character code assignment for computer text. Font developers need to be fully conversant with this state of affairs. Is it possible to assign the same code to the two variants of a letter and leave it to the installed font to render it one way or the other according to its underlying style?