The Structure of Yorùbá Language in Brief

 

The Structure of Yorùbá Language in Brief

Credit: Prof L. O. Adewole

Yoruba for academic purpose

Yorùbá is spoken in the South-western part of Nigeria. The language is regarded as one of the three major languages of the country. Apart from Nigeria, the language is also spoken in some parts of Togo and Benin Republics and the awareness of the language is noted in Brazil and Cuba.

The structure of the language for simple declarative sentences is subject, verb and object as in Ó na Adé. ‘He hit Adé’. Ó ‘He’ is a pronoun and the subject of the sentence, nà ‘to hit’ is a verb and Adé is a noun and the object of the sentence. The structure of the relative clause and the descriptive adjective is in the form of modified-modifier while that of the associative construction is the reverse, i.e modifier-modified. Examples are - relative clause: Aṣọ tí mo rà ‘The cloth which I bought’ where aṣọ ‘cloth’ is the item that is modified and tí mo rà ‘which I bought’ are the items that modify it; adjectival modifier: Bàtà dúdú ‘The black shoes’ where bàtà ‘shoes’ is the item that is modified and dúdú ‘black’ is the item that modifies it and associative construction: Ọmọ ọn Olú ‘Olú’s child’ where Olú ‘a name’ is the item that is modified and ọmọ ‘a child’ is the item that modifies it. The ọn between ọmọ ‘a child’ and Olú ‘a name’ is the associative marker.

Yorùbá is a prepositional rather than a postpositional language. The three prepositions in the language are ti (for expressing the point of departure in time or space), sí (for goal, including non-directional goal) and ní (for location). The three can be exemplified as follows: Mo ti Èkó lọ gbé e wá ‘I brought it from Lagos’, Mo lọ sí ọjà ‘I went to market’ and Mo rí Olú ní ilé ‘I saw Olú at home’.

There is no inflected adjective form or adjectival modifier to indicate comparison such as ‘-er’ in English as in ‘Olú is taller than Dàda’. Comparison and superlative are expressed by the verb jù or the verbs jù lọ as in Òjó ju Bọ́lá ‘Òjó is older than Bọ́lá’. Ó ga ju Adé ‘He is taller Adé’ and Aṣọọ Títí mọ́ ju ti Lọlá, Yẹ́misí àti Ṣọlá lọ ‘Títí’s clothes are cleaner than those of Lọlá, Yẹ́misí and Ṣọlá’.

All the adverbs in the language occur post-verbally as in Ó lọ kíákíá ‘He went quickly’ and Ó lọ rí ‘He went (there) before’ where kíákíá ‘quickly’ and rí ‘before’ are adverbs. It should be noted that some of these adverbs can be converted to nouns. For example, kíákíá in Ó lọ kíákíá ‘He went quickly’, is an adverb but the kíákíá in kíákíá ni ó lọ ‘(lit: quickly, he went) ‘He went quickly’, the same item has been converted to a noun. It is the same type of conversion that takes place when we use words such as bomb as a noun in They made a bomb and converted to a verb in They bomb the place.

The verb infinitive is marked by the morpheme í which is assimilated in standard Yorùbá to the vowel of the item preceding it as in Ó mọ iṣẹ́ í ṣe or Ó mọ iṣẹ́ẹ́ ṣe ‘He knows how to work’ and Ó fẹ́ í lọ or Ó fẹ́ẹ́ lọ ‘H wants to go’.

Yes/No questions are differentiated from the corresponding assertion by intonation. Some of the other types of questions are as follows: Ṣé ó wá? ‘Did he come?’, Ó jẹun dan? ‘Did he eat?’, Má fi ọwọ́ kan kí ni? ‘Don’t touch what?’, Ta ni ìyẹn? ‘Who is that?’, Kí ni ìyẹn? ‘What is that?’ and Èwo ni ìyẹn ‘Which is that?’.