Cultural Export

(R-L). Kola Tubosun and of Luis Morais, a Brazilian volunteer who lives in London.

An online Yoruba dictionary has been launched to help the Yoruba race in Nigeria go beyond borders. Solomon Elusoji writes

In January 2015, Kola Tubosun put up a campaign on popular fundraising site, Indiegogo, seeking $5,000 dollars for the commencement of a Yoruba Name Dictionary project. By the end of March, the campaign had raised more than was required.

“The fundraising felt very exciting. I sent mails to everybody I have ever met - friends, family. And people were very nice. It seemed they liked the idea,” Tubosun told me during a chat at Capital Square in Lagos. We are seated face-to-face, two mugs of water on the table separating us. His English is Queen, and for a moment, you wonder whether this guy can speak Yoruba.

With the funds raised, the project is already in full swing, and the dictionary is expected to go live in a couple of weeks on yorubaname.com<http://yorubaname.com>. Users will be able to find their Yoruba names, its meanings, etymology, alternate spellings, morphological and phonological information, pronunciation (via sound), and other relevant cultural information. And, akin to the Wikipedia system, users can contribute to the dictionary by inputting relevant information which is absent on the site, or which they believe to be incorrect.

“From the first week of the project, I started to collect and collate every name I found in newspapers and radio, everywhere,” Tubosun says. “Then I got the first volunteer on the project, Dapo Aderemi, who lives in the Netherlands. Then I met another guy who’s from Brazil and has a burning interest in Yoruba culture, because some of his ancestors were Yoruba. Then there is Koko Godswill.

“We’ve built a prototype of the site already; all the plans are ready. Now, I have an excel sheet that has thousands of name. We’ve thumb-marked most of them. We are going to input the meanings there; although when we launch, the meanings of all the names will not be there, yet, but the names will be there. And if you know any meaning, and you want to help us fill it, you can send it to us via the website.

Tubosun’s work should be viewed in the proper context. According to the United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO), “it is estimated that, if nothing is done, half of 6000 plus languages spoken today will disappear by the end of this century. With the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge embedded, in particular, in indigenous languages.”

“African languages have enormous cultural value,” Tubosun tells me, “but they are not being represented, and by extension they are losing their value.

“Our intention is to make sure that African languages are represented, and that communication technologies are adaptable to our own languages. You should be able to type a Yoruba name in Microsoft Word, and not have a red line come under your input. And why that happens – the red line – is because these names are not on record. But if we have these names on record, then we can talk to Microsoft and say we have a database of names which you should incorporate in your products, especially the ones you market in this part of the world.”

He argues that there is a lot to gain from promoting local languages in this way – documenting them and making them widely accessible via the internet and compatible with major communication technologies. The first reason, according to him, is that it helps in preserving our cultural heritage and identity.

“The Jewish people were dispersed around the world for over thousands of years,” he tells me. “They were everywhere, but they continued to keep their culture. The language went away after a while; people had records of it, and they were speaking it to their families inside their homes. But when Israel was formed in 1948, they went back, got all the records they needed and recreated the language. And now Hebrew is the official language of Israel. So, if we want our culture to survive, we should be interested in documenting our language.

“If you want to sell a product in the US, the product manual has to be written in English. If it’s not written in English, it won’t get past immigration. However in Nigeria, Chinese companies send us products with manuals and labels written in Chinese, and we buy it and use it. If, as a government policy, we say that any product that is coming to Nigeria has to have, at least one Nigerian language – we can’t ask them to put it in all of the hundreds of languages that we have. . .”

“But that’s the problem,” I interrupt him. “We have a lot of languages that you don’t even know which to pick.”

“Yeah, it’s a problem,” he concedes. “But that’s fine. I’m saying that a start is: let the Chinese people decide what language they prefer; if they think the product is selling more in the North, they put Hausa, if they think it is selling more in the West, they put Yoruba. But the important thing is that they are employing Nigerians to translate the manual from Chinese. And that provides employment for Nigerian translators.

“It also does something else, which is, adults who speak Yoruba, Hausa, or any of the local languages, and who don’t speak English feel more connected when they see such products. My grand-father can read anything in Yoruba, but he can’t read in English. He’s a literate man, but only in one language.

“So, if we force foreigners to do that, we are sending a message across that we value our languages. And this is one of the things countries do that convey a sense of pride and identity.”

A staunch believer in bilingualism, Tubosun finds it hard to understand why the Nigerian society (and government) continues to, directly and indirectly, discredit the promotion of local languages.

I propose a theory: “Don’t you think it’s because we have so many languages and government is sceptical about promoting one, while leaving out the other? Maybe that’s why we stick to English.”

He thinks it’s a no-brainer. “That’s an excuse people give all the time; I don’t think it prevents us from promoting these local languages,”

“What if we use Pidgin?” I suggest, attempting to promote my unifying one-language theory.

“Pidgin is fine; I hope we get there someday. It could be Hausa, I don’t mind. But I believe we can also have languages that don’t unite everybody, but so many people speak. South Africa has eleven official languages. The South African National anthem has about 5 languages. There is Xhosa (first stanza, first two lines), Zulu (first stanza, last two lines), Sesotho (second stanza), Afrikaans (third stanza), and English (final stanza).”

His point? There can be beauty in diversity.

He also points out the irony inherent in Nigerians’ aggressive possessiveness of the English language. “Sometimes our presidents go abroad, and speak terrible English. So, even though they are speaking English, these guys still subtitle the words on the screen, so that their people can understand what they are saying. So, why are we wasting our time? Why not go there and speak your Ijaw language?

“When we want to go study abroad we are still asked to take TOEFL. Why? Because, despite the fact that we have spoken English all our lives, the Americans and British still do not believe we can speak competent English. So, why are wasting our time?”

Apparently, with his Queens English accent, Tubosun is not advocating for a ban on the English Language. But he believes there is no reason why our local languages should not be significantly valued and promoted as a veritable tool of literacy and enlightenment.

A linguist by training, Tubosun tells me he has always been interested in language for a long time, although he didn’t realise it. He was raised in Ibadan. His father was a poet, writer and broadcaster, who wrote books in Yoruba, and produced albums with local Yoruba artists. Although he spoke to his children in Yoruba, most of the books he gave Tubosun were in English. That dual experience helped him grow up being able to speak both languages.

“He came to my school once and embarrassed me by announcing to my classmates that he doesn’t understand English. I felt so bad, and had to convince my friends he was just joking. You know, it was a private school where you were punished for speaking Yoruba during school hours,” Tubosun tells me.

He applied for Communication Arts and Linguistics when he was ready for the University. But he didn’t know what the two courses were about. The University of Ibadan offered him Linguistics. “After the first year, I knew that was where I belonged. So, from there on it was easy to ask myself how I could use the background I have and the curiosities I’ve had for a long time to make it work me,” he says.

“After NYSC, I was at home for two years still trying to figure out what to do. Then I got on the Fulbright program – which was an opportunity to go teach Yoruba in the US. When I saw it, I just knew it was exactly what I had been looking for. So, I went for ten months. By the time I was done, I knew I was going to do a Masters in Linguistics; so I applied for a Masters in the same Institution.”

Now, he teaches English in a secondary school in Nigeria, although, he tells me, he has hopes of completing his PhD and lecturing in a university.

The Yoruba Names is just one of the many projects he has been involved in to make Yoruba adaptable to new technology. Significantly, he led a successful campaign to make Twitter available in Yoruba.

Five years from now, he hopes the Yoruba Names project should have become stable enough for he and his team to start working on other local languages. But how does he hope to keep the site running for so long?

“We’ve applied for grants,” he replies, “but we haven’t received any yet. We’ve also thought about placing ads on the site, in a way that doesn’t intrude on the work itself.

“We intend to also bring the skills we are acquiring now into other people’s projects in the future. For example, some people in East Africa might wake up one day and decide they want to do something like this with their local language; so they can invite us and we can make money from there to sustain the site.”

Tubosun’s overall vision is to start a revolution, and change the way local languages are viewed in this part of the world – as something that can be dispensed and done away with, without consequences. And he wants to starts by documenting Yoruba names.

“From my end, this is just a start,” he enthuses. “I want to have a Yoruba dictionary, where you can find any word.”