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The
Yorùbá language is spoken by about 30 to 40 million speakers.
Majority of Yoruba native speakers live in the South Western part of Nigeria.
Yoruba is also natively spoken in the Republic of Benin and Togo. Many
Yorùbá speaking communities are also found in the Northern
and Eastern parts of Nigeria, in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and different parts
of West Africa.
Sociologically, the
term Yorùbá describes a number of semi-independent peoples
loosely linked by geography, language, history, culture and religion. The
Yorùbá live primarily in Nigeria and have resided in cities
for many hundreds of years and are among the most urbanized peoples in
Africa. Yorùbá language is a dialect continuum. It has a
number of geographic dialects marked by differences in pronunciation, grammatical
structures, and vocabulary. |
