ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 30: Yoruba Yoruba is a language spoken by 30 million people
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 30: Yoruba Yoruba is a language spoken by 30 million people primarily in West Africa. It is in the Niger-Congo language family, the same family the Bantu languages though Yoruba is not of that branch. Yoruba is a religious language for many Afro-American religions, primarily Caribbean Santeria and Brazilian Candomble. Yoruba is a pluricentric language. This means that unlike Japanese or Romanian, which have only a single formal form, Yoruba has multiple formal dialects. Other well known pluricentric languages are Arabic, Spanish, and English. Yoruba, like English and Chinese, is an isolating language with SVO (subject - verb - object) word order. It is also tonal, making use of three tones. An interesting phonetic feature of the language is the presence of labio-velar stops. This sound is like an English /k/ and /p/ pronounced at the same time. -- source link