Yoruba · Yorùbá

About Yoruba

Language family

Niger-Congo, Volta-Niger branch

Where it's spoken

Southwestern Nigeria, Benin, Togo

Speakers

roughly 45 million speakers

Yoruba is a tonal language with a centuries-deep oral literature of proverbs, praise poetry, and the Ifá divination corpus, a body of verse historically transmitted by trained specialists. The Atlantic slave trade carried Yoruba speakers and religious vocabulary to the Americas, where it shaped Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian traditions such as Santería and Candomblé that still use Yoruba-derived terms today. It belongs to the Niger-Congo family, one of the world's largest, alongside Igbo and hundreds of other West and Central African languages.