 This is the Yoruba webinar, you have got sound, it keeps automatically muting. Welcome everyone and to those of you who came yesterday, welcome back. For those of you who couldn't attend yesterday, just to say quickly that I'm Marian Wallace, lead curator for Africa at the British Library. I work in the Asian and African Studies Department of the BL where we have large collections on Africa. I'm delighted now to welcome you to our second How Should We Write Yoruba webinar. Yesterday's session from Mission Field to webpage was very well attended and we had lively discussions and numerous audience questions. I'm sure we'll have an equally lively debate today with five experts speakers addressing questions around using Yoruba today, literature, leisure and the academy. I'm also delighted to report again that around 400 people have registered for this event on at least three continents. Many of you are Yoruba speakers while some don't speak the language but are interested in the broader questions we hope to raise today. Several people asked yesterday about whether this event would be available afterwards, so let me just fill you in now. The recordings of today's and yesterday's events will be uploaded to the British Library's YouTube channel and they should be available next week. When the recordings go live, we'll send an email to everyone who registered for the webinars to let you all know and we'll also send out the links for putting in the chat. Just also a quick request, if you have questions that you would like the panellists to answer, could you put them in the Q&A please? The chat will also be open and you're welcome to use it, but if the questions go in the Q&A, they're easier for us to manage. Thank you. So today's webinar reflects the inspiration and hard work of Kola Chibosun who will be chairing the session. Kola is a current British Library Chevening Fellow in the Asian and African collections. He's a linguist who's been leading the way on promoting Yoruba on the internet and a creative writer. It's been my privilege to supervise Kola over the last year when, among other things, he's been investigating the BL's Yoruba language collections. I'm also very pleased that the Lagos Studies Association and Africa Rights, the literary festival of the Royal African Society, are partnering with us for this event. I'd like to thank them, the illustrious group of presenters and moderators that Kola has put together, and everyone involved in organising the event. So without further ado, let me hand over to you, Kola. Thank you very much, Marion. My name is Kola Chibosun. I'm currently the Chevening Research Fellow at the British Library. It's my pleasure to welcome you. It gives me great pleasure to host today's events after yesterday's equally engaging panel. Yesterday's theme, from Mission Field to Webpage, focused on the history of Yoruba writing from Ajai Kralba to date. Professor Karim Baba examined the pleasure of the well-marked page using her own example from her time in EFET. While Dr Tunde Adibola went deep into the challenges of language technology, Professor Femitai will round it off by taking us into the philosophy in how writing limitations can also limit the exploration of thought. Today, I'm delighted to welcome five new panelists to continue the conversation. First up is Nigerian writer, cultural activist, and author, Malara Wood. We invited her because of a unique perspective as a Yoruba speaker, creative writer, editor, and activist. And even though her creative works are mostly written in English, her background and extensive knowledge gives her a good view into the challenges of today's creative writers working in either language. I thank her for agreeing to join us today, and I hand you over to her for her 10 minutes presentation titled Literary Production in the Yoruba Language. Like Marion said, the question and answers, you can send me questions through the Q&A box and you can continue the conversation in the chat box. I'm going to hand over to Malara now for her presentation. You're muted. Okay, let me see. Am I unmuted now? Yes, we can hear you now. Okay, great. Can you please see my screen? Yes, I can see. I'm sharing my screen. Can you see it? Yes, I can. Okay, brilliant, brilliant. Thank you so much. Now, it's a pleasure to be here. I thank Collette Busson for inviting me and for putting together this wonderful webinar, thanks also to the British Library. I'll just launch straight into it. And the title of my presentation is Literary Production in the Yoruba Language. When I knew that I was going to be speaking at this event today, I looked at, I can't see my next slide. Okay, yeah, a few questions. A few questions. Is Yoruba difficult? Do diacritics share part of the blame? How is Yoruba fairing today? Are we writing enough in Yoruba? How do we bring back Yoruba literary education? Those are part of what I will try to address in this little slot that I have. And preparing for today, I remembered attending a workshop about a decade ago, 2010, thereabouts, in Abuja, on the harmonization and standardization of Nigerian and related languages, Benin, Cameroon, and Niger Republic, organized by the Center for Black and African Arts and Civilization Seaback, as well as the Center for Advanced Studies of African Society. And at that workshop, Professor Kwesi Kwapra, I hope I'm saying his name properly, of CASAS, said this of the Yoruba language. Take Yoruba for example, it's full of diacritics. It detracts from the reading. Take a newspaper that's written in Yoruba, and the first thing you see is not a language, it's a forest of diacritics. It's written as if it's for a foreigner who wants to read Yoruba, not for someone who is born Yoruba. And I've had occasion, end of course, I've had occasion to think back to that statement over the last 10 years. For a start, I mean, we'll come to some of the, what he says later. But yeah, I've had cause to wonder, is Yoruba written with diacritics, a forest of a thousand demons? Is it Igboirumole? And at the end of what he says that it's for, that diacritics are for foreigners and not for those born in Yoruba. That statement assumes that those born Yoruba will not need diacritics. That is just not true. As anyone who reads Yoruba knows, you do need diacritics to tell you what the meanings of words are. So about a week or so ago, the author, Jim Akeberi Simo, announced on Twitter that she has a forthcoming book. She has a book coming up in Yoruba, and a lot of responses to that, a lot of reactions, a lot of congratulations. And also people who were saying, oh, you know, this is going to be good, you know, for the very hard task of teaching my children, teaching children Yoruba. And I thought, is teaching children Yoruba, is it really that difficult? I don't think so. I think it's, we have come to this place now where people see Yoruba as being such a hammer on children's heads. Because of what I call a distancing from the language, many, many Yoruba today, Yoruba people have gone into exile from their own language. And that distancing, that it creates a sense of, there's a disconnection. And so when, even when you see Simo Yoruba text, the immediate psychological reaction is to think, oh, this is so difficult. And what we have is a capitulation altogether, where upon people don't even bother, and then also don't see it as cool. Talking of reading in the Yoruba language. Now, 30 years ago, 20, 30 years ago, we had a lot of books, a lot of books, a lot of reading being done in the Yoruba language. Another thing about, is it difficult? When we were young, we read all these books, Ibu Olopun Woeje, the Fagunwa books, we read these books, who were 10 year olds, who were seven year olds. We were not any brighter than the young Nigerians of today. What's happened is something in the psyche that makes people feel alienated from the language. And so you had all those books all those years ago, but now we don't really have new writings coming forward, creative writing, I mean, poetry, fiction, nothing significant. And if you want to read a novel in the Yoruba language, you'd have to go back to something that was published 20 years ago, 25 years ago, most likely. So yeah, diacritics, a forest of a thousand demons, an exercise in pedantry, is it an attachment to anachronistic ideals? Should we bow to misdirected social media nomenclature, such as the following examples? I hope you can see my screen. That's Olu Dolaqo, a beautiful name, and it's mangled online on social media by a lot of Yoruba millennials, I might say. Ola Wale, Ola Dolaqo, and I hear people wondering whether we should change Yoruba to accommodate this kind of mangling. And when I look at those names, I just win. I want to take a painkiller, that's how I feel, because there's no rhyme, no reason to these names. They're not even elegant. And we have to remember that someone like Shadiadu has held the world in trial for over 30 years with her beautiful, simple, un-mangled Yoruba name. And when you also look at what is being done online with some of these names now, it's from a Eurocentric mindset. They are names we rendered such that it would seem to be amenable to people to an anglicized sensibility. And also, they're also not correct because H is being added to names that have no H in them. And also perpetuating stereotypes about Yoruba people as to whether we drop our H when we're supposed to have H, or whether we, you know, the other way around. So let me just move on swiftly. We need diacritics. Look at these two statements. Jesu bei bei alakba ju konsiwa. Without diacritics, a comedian did an exercise on this on the internet recently. And it was, people were saying Jesu bei bei alakba ju konsiwa. Jesus carried a pope. That's papaya to some of you. Jesus carried a pope. Elder, throw one at us. Whereas what it really means is Jesus stayed there a long time and there was a Jew elder elder. And without diacritics, everyone is just running around in the dark. Then take number three. Owokaw owoni. For us as fiction writers, especially where we're trying to give expression to our reality. Without diacritics, you cannot do that well enough. Owokaw owoni, you can't do that without diacritics. Without diacritics, you lose clarity and meaning. There are also branch distortions going on these days. So you have very, very fashionable products in fashion magazines, whether beauty products. And it's also seen as exotic and cool to have some tonal mark on these products. But they are usually wrong. Such that, and I opened one magazine on an airplane and it said, oh, this means beauty in the Yoruba language. But what they'd written was not Ewa, which is beauty. They'd written something more closely aligned to beings. So you have these distortions going on. You lose nuance. You lose context. Ambiguity is important for fiction. You lose those as well. Oh, God, she's ten minutes gone. It's also a misrepresentation of Yoruba people and language. You miss the richness. So let me jump forward a little. On social media now, we have a flowering of Yoruba language. Some years ago, we felt a need to do tweet Yoruba, to encourage people to speak Yoruba. But now there's no need for that because Yoruba is being spoken all over the place on social media. And without apology, this tweet is from yesterday. Netflix, like NIDA, actually tweeting back at the artist's reminisce in Yoruba. And everyone loved it. Let me just move on quickly with publishing in Yoruba because I can't tell how much time I have left. Kola may wish to let me know. With publishing in Yoruba, what I'm trying to do, and many of us are trying to do as people writing fiction or commissioning, is to try to commission as much as possible, find opportunities for publishing the odd poem or short story or translated excerpt in publications that we're working with. And these are publications largely intended for reading in English. Also, we have new developments such as 2019, the Cassava Republic Press won a grant from the African Publishing Innovation Fund grant to start an African language imprint, which actually led to Yoruba's forthcoming book, which is coming from Cassava Republic. I'm Tifedito now at WIDA, and we're also looking to publish a fiction in Yoruba when there's opportunity, but we don't have many manuscripts coming through. I'm aware that Ben Tomolojou published a book last year, or Goroniton, 100 short stories in Yoruba. So, knowing that I was going to do this, I did ask Dumeke Verissimo on writing Yoruba fiction, and she gave an example of what she did with this book. I speak what many would describe as Yorubaic, or it is urban, receptive, and somewhat inventive. It is, however, not the Yoruba I write in. This is because my literacy in Yoruba came from my mom, and then, of course, the cataclysm class of my younger years. Let me just jump ahead. I will put some of her, what she says in the chats later. Now, Tadeh Padeola, the poet and former president of Penn Nigeria, is a long-term collaborator of mine, and we've, over the last, the best part of the last 20 years, always talked about, you know, writing in Yoruba. At one time, we were going to start an imprint, even specifically for the Yoruba language, but personal feelings, systemic feelings, it never came to pass. And he says, my sense of diacritics is that they're not decorative, of course, and it's not pedantic to insist on their use. It's actually critical. I agree. I will put more of his comments in the chats later. And I'm currently editing, curating Ake Review Journal, which is the journal of the Ake Arts and Book Festival, and I did ask him, I commissioned him, please let us have some poetry. The poem came, it was something for the recently departed Chadwick Boseman as a tribute. And he did, and Tadeh Padeola said, oh, by the way, I also wanted to write in Yoruba, but I don't know if I have enough time. I said, well, you know what, you'd better write it. And here you have it. This is the poem, Epon Law, Latio, what Tadeh Padeola. And so this is it, we're being intentional, where there's opportunity to actually publish, you know, encourage ourselves, and so on and so forth. And I was going to play you, Tadeh Padeola's reading of that poem, but you can just enjoy it. Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much for that beautiful presentation. We'll get back to discussing it and sharing some of the things you mentioned there after the second presentation. Thank you very much. Next up is Kali Kotzi, who is the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies and a research associate at the University of Witwatersrand. I couldn't pronounce that. Johannesburg, South Africa. Her presentation is titled, How Do We Write Yoruba? Experiences in Academic Policy. I should mention here that one of the reasons this webinar happened today is a conversation I had with Kali in June, which coincided perfectly with something I'd been thinking about all year about Yoruba and literature and publishing. Her own frustrations as an editor dealing with work written in Yoruba and English brought into view some of the issues we've often overlooked, but have relevance for the survival of the language as a tool of academic writing. In a few weeks, all plans came into view and here we are. So I look forward to hearing her presentation. Over to you now, Kali. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm totally out of my depth here. I'm so grateful to be invited, but I'm here just to display my ignorance. So this presentation is written by someone who neither reads nor speaks and certainly does not write Yoruba. Although I've spent many hours pretending to and laboriously moving words from one document to another as I edit authors work. I have a small document with with commonly used names and words and use it when I need to correct or edit articles that use Yoruba names or words. So centuries ago, my own surname used to have an accent and was spelled cushe in French, but the spelling changed over time, and it now includes the diphthong, which gives so many people trouble. The surname generally is pronounced now as kutsia. In the 17th century, it would have been pronounced kushe and by people in the English speaking world is generally pronounced either as kutsi or kutsi. And my first name, as my mother would say it is Kali with a long accent at A, but no one pronounces it that way except my family. Those of you who have an ear for accents will hear that I'm not English and when I wear a mask, no one can understand me here. I've always been extremely interested in accents and in tone and in the value these things have. I've even written a monograph called Accented Futures. So you can hear I'm mentioning these things to defend myself against a possible perception that I'm someone who's not thought carefully about these things. In my work as a journal editor, I receive many articles that use Yoruba words or terms. Sometimes the submissions make use of the full range of standard orthographic symbols available, and often the phrase used to describe such work is beautiful. Just as often, however, Nigerian scholars write what I consider to be excellent articles but do not use these symbols. And when the request is made that they do so, they admit never having learned or used them. And I'm talking in particular about young scholars in Nigeria. In the US, the case is very different. It's risky and perhaps not a polite thing to do as the only non Yoruba speaker. But I'm going to argue, unlike most others in this two day set of talks, the tone marks and sub dots should not be compulsory, and that all this an editor should be allowed to have some room for negotiation. My comments are based on my experiences working with Nigerian colleagues and in particular with early career scholars based at universities in Nigeria, who have few resources and hardly any institutional backing. The big profs can look after themselves and they can decide what they want to do and what their politics are. But my concern is with the upcoming generation of scholars who do not regard themselves as Yoruba specialists. So here my comments are very different from, for example, the editors of the Yoruba Studies Review. If you are the editor of Yoruba Studies Review, you should demand and expect complete compliance. When we talk about Yoruba orthography, we're talking about our attempts to portray the spoken word accurately on the page. The sub dots and the diacritic marks are meant to evoke or retain the traces of the spoken word. We're more familiar with the processes through which South African languages became standardized, but I'm sure the histories of Yoruba are similar. We all know about the role played by missionaries and by European descriptive linguists in standardizing African languages. We also know that what's regarded as standard Yoruba is not written in cement. Standard Yoruba is a mix of dialects. There's no pure and original Yoruba unchanged through time. When we require that authors use a way of representing spoken language on a page, we assume that they've been taught the current orthography. But tone marks and sub dots themselves have a history. And over the last 250 years, the orthography has frequently been updated. We see that actually as one of the dominant discourses. There's always attempts or calls for an interest in renewing and revising Yoruba orthography. Until 1994, the journal I edit was produced by hand and tone marks were entered with a pen. In 1994, we enter the computer age and the journal started being produced on a linotronic 300 at the University of London Computer Centre. And there are many anecdotes told by the copy editor Michael Mann about his inventiveness and resourcefulness, resulting in an oral archive of anecdotes about his challenges and victories, including sub dots and tone marks on the page. The nature of the journal's attention to questions of language has changed over time and shifted from an earlier interest in descriptive linguistics and descriptive approaches to an understanding of language as a creative and vibrant archive and evolving expressive form. In the last few years, the journal has published articles and abstracts that cite and refer to standard varieties of language. But we've also published groundbreaking scholarship on urban vernaculars, for example, on Kenyan Sheng. So the vision of language is of something that is always shifting and always emerging and changing. For the decisions that deal with the language of urban youth in Nigeria, for example, we think it's appropriate to use in the article registers that reflect and share the terminology of the humans, the authors writing about. For a recent article, we printed the abstract in Sheng rather than in standard kiss Wahili in a different article, one might make other decisions. But certainly the journal considers Sheng and Nigerian pigeon as languages, alongside standard Yoruba and standard kiss Wahili. When an article is submitted to the journal in which Yoruba is not incidental, but is part of the argument made, I think it's vital that every single tone mark and every diacritic and sub-dot should be absolutely perfect. For this purpose, we recently invited Dr. Bukola Aluko Kupet Kupoti to join the editorial board and to oversee the Yoruba words and names. So whenever an article comes in, we make sure that she looks at every single stage of the article. Basically, we published a special issue on the Nigerian film director, Tunde Kelani, and for this celebrated director and for many of the authors contributing to the special issue, such as the Ibadan, Profs Adeshina Afolanyan and Ayo Adey-Duntan, the representation of the language on the page was not just incidental, but an essential part of their arguments. On the film posters and covers of the DVDs of Tunde Kelani, we see the beauty of the orthography. And it's part of the intention of Kelani's work to display and to celebrate Yoruba language and culture. In another article from Nigeria, however, and also maybe writing about the experience of street touts, as Mr. Jonah Ooyi did in one of the articles we published. For his article, the beauty of the Yoruba was not an important part of the argument. Neither he nor the touts with whom he spoke, spoke standard Yoruba, and therefore we didn't think it was important that the words on the page needed to conform. To have asked him to include tone marks and sub-dots, it seemed to me, was to introduce a level of fakery in his argument, as well as his authorial voice. My question is this, is the work of authors who do not use sub-dots and tone marks necessarily ugly? Where in lies the beauty of the orthography and what value do we attach to it? What is the purpose and who's the audience for the beautiful Yoruba? Should journal editors require that all authors conform to the aesthetically pleasing standard? Even if the author has never used those marks, and in fact needs time consuming and expensive labor to insert them. So for another young scholar, Elizabeth Olayewola, we required her to standardize the Yoruba and for a young woman on a very small income, she had to spend a great amount of money to get to pay someone to do that for her. This places yet another obstacle in the way of younger scholars who already have so little and have to overcome so much adversity. I would like as a journal editor, together with authors, to be able to assess the degree of accentedness in a submission and to make decisions along with the author on whether to use the formal standardized Yoruba or to expect and to express the fluidity and change of language. I'm not suggesting that there's an evolution from beautiful Yoruba to unaccented language, but I'm suggesting that not all authors need to use the full range of symbols available and that their work can still be beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for staying 10 minutes range. It's a very thought provoking article to lead into discussion. I think that may want to bring Ms. Wood on the screen as well. I would like to start with this question to you, Kali, and I know that you're the conversation we had at the beginning that brought us here was about the fact that when people send in journal articles, people have different competence levels in Yoruba to start with, and then the audience is also different. Not all audiences can read Yoruba writings or not. But the most prevalent argument for returning the tone marks has always been the being and the ambiguities that can result from it. There are many words down that we can see in print. But we don't know them anymore because they were not written with marks. So, so people who are reading Yoruba audiences, you know, will need to find a way to understand it. The tone marks are not there. They can understand it. So how much of this is a challenge for you as an editor? And what has been the response of Nigerian scholars who read or submit articles to your journal? So the special interest, my special interest is early career scholars. And so I work mostly, I work with the big profs, but I work mostly with young scholars. And most of the scholars who come to the journal I work for are not Yoruba specialists. They tend to work on expressive culture or popular culture, film music. So in that sense, the Yoruba that comes into their work is often not what we in South Africa would call the deep language. I don't know if Yoruba has that same if you use that too. So we generally don't publish articles that use deep Yoruba. And so I think it's also it's a generational issue. I hear also a lot of Yoruba pride, pride in the di-critics in the beauty of the language. Of course, that is a discourse I'm familiar with and in conversation that comes up a lot. But it is not something that comes to the journal very often these days. Does that answer the question? Okay, a bit. Yes, it does. I'm going to come back to you a little bit. Miss Wood, thank you for your own presentation as well. I wanted to ask something you mentioned earlier about publishing and the fact that currently we don't have as many as much of a vibrant environment for publishing your Yoruba language in Nigeria. So what would be the recommended solution? Many people say that the audience is not there, which would be weird to think because in the past there used to be a whole generation of people who read these works and talked about them, etc. So the audience, how much of an audience is there? And when the publisher wants to think of publishing a book, he wants to think of that the audience is there. So how do we break this cycle? And what has been your own experience in dealing with this question? Okay, thank you for that question. I just wanted to say very quickly, there is deep Yoruba, we call it Ijinle Yoruba. I also disagree that there is no pure, forgive me if I miscontinued Dr. Kali, but that there is no pure Yoruba that has stayed unchanged over time. There is no pure language that has stayed unchanged over time. Whatever that statement was, that also applies to every language on earth. So back to your question, Kola. I think that part of what you're getting at with this webinar, part of the questions you're asking is, how do we increase literacy in the Yoruba language? And that comes with teaching children. Okay. And I also say that we need to promote a radicalized consciousness in children with regard to the Yoruba language. Why a radicalized consciousness? Because even when you're teaching your children Yoruba or in school, everywhere they go in this society, they're discouraged even by people that they love, even by people whose opinions they otherwise value. So education is part of that. The readership is there if we can break this cycle of literacy and alienation, which is all about mindset, really. The readership is there because the readership has always been there. You have people who are over 40 million. That's a lot by way of readership. So we do need that. And also I think what happens to the Nigerian publishing environment, Nigerian publishing industry in the 80s, whatever happens to publishing in the English language, happened tenfold for a language such as Yoruba. And so, and there's been that psychological, psychological going into exile from the language that's happened since then. So I think it's a combination of all those things. And then those of us that work in publishing, whether we write or we commission works, and I do that. And you and I have also had quite a bit of collaboration in this respect. It's to be intentional about, you know, publishing. So I'm curating for a journal that is largely in English. The easy option is to say, oh, no one's ever going to read this. If we put a page and we publish something on a page in Yoruba, no one's going to. But you push the envelope and you actually see that people will respond well. And then other people are encouraged to produce, to write. If the environment is there, you will have more writers writing. And if people are writing, people will start to read. It's a process. It's going to take us some time. I agree with you. Thank you so much. At 40 minutes past three, we're going to take a five minutes break before we come back to the next session. But I want to ask this last question of Carly. If I get you right, you are one of the suggestions you've made is that if the language itself is not the primary focus of a journal essay that's written in English, that these diacritics might not be important. I was, I just picked up this while you're talking. This is a book, Olesha Enka's Years of Childhood, and if you notice, the name AK there is written with the appropriate diacritics on it. Without it, it should be something else. And anybody picking it up might think of it as maybe as an incorrectly written English word. So there is sometimes a need for the disambiguation that is necessary to show that a word is not an English word. So how do you, you know, do you kind of understand, appreciate the need, I mean, the reason why people make these kinds of, you know, appeal. Sure. Absolutely. And as I said before, when it's an article like the articles on Tunde Kehlani, we went through to great trouble to make sure that every single sub-dot was in place. But if an article is about people speaking, to use it as an example, speaking Shane, then I'm happy for the author not to write in standard Kiswahili, but to use Shane in the abstract. In other words, I'm saying that language exists at many levels. And language is always evolving. Thank you so much. In 40 minutes plus three, I have really enjoyed this panel. Sorry for the really abrupt cotton. But we'll have you and, you know, we have Dr. Kotzi. Sorry, I can't pronounce it. You're going to have to teach me how to pronounce it. I'll show you the autocracy. Thank you. Along with the other three panelists. That at the end, we have a discussion. But for now, everyone, thank you very much for your time and we'll see you back in five minutes. We're about to start back. Is everyone here? I'm here. Okay, welcome back everyone. And it's great to welcome you back to the next panel, which consists of three people who work in academia in three in different dimensions. And the next person who is going next is a PhD student and writing instructor at the University of Florida. Before this he was a full bright foreign language teaching assistant at Yale, with some experience in teaching non-European speakers in the United States how to read and use your robot. Her talk is titled a student's perspective of learning and teaching. We're actually looking forward to hearing her presentation. As before, you can put your questions in the Q&A, and we might ask you if you want to ask the question on video much later, or we can just ask them for you. So I'm not going to hand over to Mosmola. Thank you very much for this opportunity. My name is Mosmola Adeljo, and I'm going to share my experience as a student and a teacher of Yoruba language and culture. So I would like to discuss how generally my experience of learning and teaching Yoruba shaped my understanding of Yoruba orthography, and also to talk about the considerations that Yoruba teachers should consider when teaching the language. So I attended a private school in Nigeria and although I'm from a Yoruba family, my extensive knowledge of Yoruba language and culture was built in the secondary school. So as a student of Yoruba language in Nigeria, I remember that my Yoruba writing skills improved through actual writing that is putting pen to paper. So from my first year to my sixth year in secondary school, I did a lot of Yoruba writing, which in turn improved my reading skills. My teachers were also particular about the use of tone marks. In fact, I had a teacher, Mr. Odeyemi, who would write extensive notes on the board and would always cross check our notes to ensure that we had written the words properly and that we had also used the correct tone marks. So later, I believe in my second year, I noticed that he would dictate notes to us. So instead of writing on the board, he started dictating the notes to us and surprisingly, most of us were able to write the words as we had become accustomed to Yoruba orthography. Nonetheless, one issue that most of us struggled with was that we struggled with tone marks, exact critics and what have you. In my first secondary school, another interesting dynamic was that topics shifted from grammar, from core grammar and a splash of literature to cultural topics and literature. So while many people still struggled with their critics, I noticed that we still had many students that were invested in topics that would introduce them to Yoruba culture and also topics about Yoruba literature. In hindsight, I believe that then students were more interested in topics that directly relate to them and topics that would directly relate to their lived experiences as well. So we were also interested in cultural information and this was amplified through the stories that we read and topics on wedding ceremonies, burial ceremonies, Yoruba philosophy on death, rebirth, amongst others. So before teaching Yoruba in the US, I received pedagogical training on cultural competence in foreign language teaching and learning. And what happened here was that I learned, we were taught how to focus on the students and using a student centered learning approach, which basically places the student at the center and encourages the teacher to tap into the students cultural background when teaching a foreign language. So after this training, I realized that if my teachers in Nigeria had probably focused more on infusing our own lived experiences and things that we could directly relate to into grammar and other topics, then we would perhaps have been more invested in learning Yoruba beyond the fears we had about grammar and using the right words and whatever. And so for my students in the US, I noticed something and this is where the student centered learning approach comes to play where you focus on the students cultural background and try to understand how to infuse that into your teaching. So we observed that most of them used Google translate and other translation tools for the assignments and we all know how, you know, problematic those tools can be. So with my supervisors guidance, that's Dr. Alicia Yadishola, we decided to improve on their Yoruba writing skills through journaling. And basically the idea was to introduce, introduce rather personalized learning into the syllabus and journaling was a good way to do this. So personalized learning emphasizes learning by doing and not necessarily through, you know, giving instructions and that so it's tax based and it's also student centered so students have the opportunity to learn the language by actually putting it to use through daily activities and by writing in this case. So first what we did was that we started with the beginning class during the spring semester. So in the fall semester, we are taught them different topics, basic grammar rules and what have you. So they were quite familiar with Yoruba vocabulary and they could also express themselves in Yoruba and talk about their daily activities in Yoruba. The next thing we did was to ask them to write those daily activities with whatever vocabulary that they could muster. And then we asked them to submit at the beginning of every week. And my responsibility was to read through to correct grammatical mistakes and also to grade their journals. So one major challenge, excuse me, one major challenge was that I noticed that students would first report their activities using just simple sentences like, so today I woke up, I brushed my teeth, I bathed, I slept, blah, blah, blah. And at first because I was the grader. So and reading this kind of thing, like it was repetitive for me and sometimes it was exhausting. But then I noticed that as we advanced in the class and as we started touching other topics that the students were improving. So for example, when we taught them adjectives and how to express feelings and emotions, I noticed that they started improving in their writing. And that really showed me how the complementary position that the journal had. So apart from the core class activities that were teaching the students and the core class syllabus, the journal was an aside to compliment on that. So basically this journal then became a form of documentation and also a form of revision as well for the students. So they could, in their own space, they could reflect on what they had read and what they had been taught in class and then use that to document their daily activities. And I also noticed that as I was making corrections and everything that my students, by the time they would submit their next journal entry, I noticed that they've improved on those corrections. So it showed that they were paying attention and they were also applying those corrections that had given them. So I would just wrap up now to say that teaching and being a teaching assistant with my supervisor really helped me to see the importance of understanding students background and also the importance of applying traditional methods such as writing in class. So journaling was a really useful tool that helped my students to improve in their writing skills and ultimately by the time we graded their exams and what have you, they were really better than they had been, than they were rather in the fall semester. So I'm just going to end on that note. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you, Musmola. That was very helpful. And we also stopped the time so thank you for that. Next, we'll have Professor Adelike Adeko, who is a humanities distinguished professor at Ohio State University. His talk is tied to the perspective from Nigerian academia, and I'm really looking forward to that as well because I'm, especially because of, you know, the difference between a Nigerian academic or somebody who works in the field and has also worked in a foreign academic environment. He has worked in Nigeria and also worked in Ohio, so I'm interested in seeing how he takes on the issue. So Professor Adeko, it's up to you now. Good morning from here. I know it's different times of days in different parts of the world. Thank you, Mr. Chubosun, for inviting me to join this panel. I want to ask, can you, can everyone see my screen? Yes. Okay. This screen, I'm starting with covers of dictionaries. You'll find these online. And I placed this, you see, I put, as a delano in the middle, the only monolingual Yoruba, Yoruba to Yoruba dictionary. The only one in the language. Then you have different ones. Even Delano himself wrote, compiled as a dictionary of monosyllabic verbs that Toei Farola and Michael Afulayo reissued recently, early this year, after his celebration in Lagos of his work. I'm talking about problems and prospects of a genuinely, I'm a comparitist, comparitist literary theory, comparative literary studies, especially of the Atlantic world, the United States, Caribbean, in Anglophone and Yoruba, by the way. Of a genuinely English Yoruba bilingual scholarship in an environment in which one of the two languages lacks a dictionary. And this is the record. And there are many, you will see one at the bottom, there is one on the left, bottom left screen, in French. It's again Yoruba, I don't speak French. And I know one other Yoruba person who was involved in compiling. Then on the right, you have Yoruba English, the one in yellow, by the one and only Professor Labiai, who used to be represented by the Republic. And for Muslim, he used to be chair of African languages and literatures in Florida too. But again, as vast as he is, as well read as he is, both in French, English, Portuguese and Yoruba, the dictionary put together as Yoruba English and English Yoruba. Except for Delano, all printed Yoruba word inventories are translation manuals in that facilitating as a relation of Yoruba terms into English and some other your euphonic tongues. This condition I'm going to suggest as a scholar constitute difficulties for knowledge and discovery for me. And I use examples prominent among these issues is usage or need as noted yesterday. About the generally low interest in written or writing of Yoruba, regardless of the alphabet or style adopted. The speakers of Yoruba language do not look up the meaning of words in books, except from elders and those who know. That's the assumption we carry about up till today, which I think impacts discovery a lot. Print technologies introduced in the 19th century revolutionary Yoruba call verbal culture. A code of dominant high culture from oral traditions origin texts and separated critical commentary production from historically entranced as a part. But somehow we still believe that because since we don't have dictionaries to look up, we want to talk to elders. Understandably, perhaps originally by a legal form of a Yoruba dictionary of Yoruba language published in 1913 based on crowd as 1842, 1843, a volume published by the CMS Church Missionary Society. Remember to understand that look at all your Yoruba dictionaries. Most of the words are creeped from the CMS volume of 1913 that CMS itself repeats. Two recent dictionaries are referred to OLABEI. Then FAKI LEDE. I think FAKI LEDE is on the right. Can you guys just see the screen? FAKI LEDE. Talking about diacritics, it is difficult to know what that man's name is, and that's a Yoruba dictionary. I used to call it FAKI LEDE until Tunde Akiyemi who knows it. No, it's not FAKI LEDE. That has the name. We can't even know that from the dictionary of a Yoruba language. And I think that speaks a lot to the kind of work we are doing today. How do we explain the stasis? Translation has dominated efforts in Yoruba lexicography because the introduction of print literates in the 19th century involved the belief that people in traditional oral societies do not need to look up things and that they live in a world of mock-to-mock communication where authority figures are always at hand to impose resolutions and not take questions. Unfortunately, we don't need to live in that world anymore. Modern cultural education and religious institutions, including those founded on money by literary Yoruba people, assume that only those who speak English or those who need to communicate with those who do not need reference help. This aspect of it should be noted is common in all major African languages with the exception of perhaps Kiswahili, Africans, and Arabic. I joined a Zoom group called Egbe Atelewa very recently at the beginning of summer. Participants met daily on novels to read novels selected by organizers in turn. But anytime they open up the WhatsApp page, there's always questions of what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of that? That you cannot tell people to go look up a dictionary. Many times I use that to my dear Delano. I hate to pretend as if I'm an elder when you could be telling young people to go read books. Yoruba language and scholarly plans represent literature more than the native informant. And you know the figure of the native informant in discoveries about and creating knowledge about Africa. That's what the dictionary form takes place today in knowledge production about Yoruba society and Nigeria in particular. Is that Yoruba language has become the language of the native informant that you have to translate through a specialist language, French, Spanish, or English. The native informant, remember, is the element of discovery that has to speak through a trained, disciplined intermediary. And in essence, the native informant get foreclosed in the text we write. Let me bring up the next look at. Okay, my screen is not working. I have prepared a chat. Let me stop sharing and then redo it again. You have about three minutes. Okay, the chart is about is about the same words in different languages. In the beginning with a, with a, with a CMS book. And I use a took a basic words why to be more to know. And they are translated in different ways in the same book. Because there is no, there is no communication between one language. And then I went to a, Dylan was a tumor. A borrisha. And it don't see what you can show along. And it don't see it. And it don't see what you can show along. A borrisha. A borrisha. And it in Borrisha. And when you look up Borrisha, what do you find? It absolutely, it doesn't make sense in the way people use the language. What do I mean? Okay. So at this point, I will seriously argue that we need a monolingual dictionary. If we are going to advance the language that imagine the amount, the volume amount of work that I just simply lost between 1843. And now between 1843, the first dictionary and now I am assuming that many, many of us have disappeared into ether because we simply regard ourselves as native informant. I hate to be a native informant. Thank you. Thank you very much. For that thought provoking presentation. You didn't disappoint. We appreciate it. I'm going to call you back again to have a conversation about it shortly. My name is Zaremo Adela Junior, who is a student at the University of Lagos. And a mentee of mine. In 2019 he invented the Yoruba Scrabble game called Yoruba Lingo. He's also the youngest on the list of panelists today, I believe, with some insight into what motivates his non-generation when it comes to Yoruba writing. And I invited him here to learn a bit about the challenges he faced while in the process of creating the Yoruba based, historical game. His talk is titled using Yoruba in the 21st century generation. Zaremo, you have the floor. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much, Kola. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? We can hear you. We can't see you. Yeah, I'm also trying to get my screen, but can you see the shared screen? Yes, we can. I can. I can't see it. But I can't also see myself here. I guess I will just go like, okay, yeah. Yeah, can you see me now? Yes. Yes. Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Zaremo Anulua Ko. I'm a final year student of the University of Lagos Department of Linguistics, African and Asian studies. My presentation is using Yoruba in the 21st century generation. So no language in the world were developed and used, exist without a writing system. All languages of the world are documented and appreciated, either through our rendition or by an individual, expressing them with autography. Autography is an important element in the development and development of any natural language in today's world. This is to emphasize the importance of the writing system of the Yoruba writing system that we currently have. When I was in my second year in the university, after we finished our first year, the first semester, a lot of my colleagues had difficulty with using the current autography and applying tones while writing if a lecturer is dictating in class. Also during exams, because in the first semester of your first year, most lecturers to an extent would pardon you not writing Yoruba exams with the diacritics. So as a result when I got to my second year in the university, I was trying to find a way to eradicate these problems, not just for myself or for my colleague, but also for Yoruba speakers in the diaspora, because I noticed that we are losing much of those we should be training in the diaspora, because they are not in Nigeria, in the environment, they should tap into directly. So they've been in the diaspora is more of like being out of the game already. So what I was not trying to do was to create a platform that would not just be a formal, too formal, because I noticed my generation don't really like a too formal setting which regards to some stuff. So I decided to bring in something that could be educative and at the same time would be fun. So while they are learning, they are also having fun. And I guess that would give them a kind of smooth learning. So I came on with Yoruba Lingo. It was the first African indigenous language crossword game in any African language. So while designing the game, I tried as much as possible to emphasize on the importance of tone. So while developing the game, I made sure all the slide week letters in the alphabets, in the Yoruba alphabets, which are majorly devoid of tones. The three major tones we have in the Yoruba language, the do, the re, and the mi. So while playing the game, they won't just be learning the words. They will be learning it and learning the tone, because I'm not in support of some people who would say we should do it even with the tone. So what I've also tried as much as possible to do with the game is to try to make sure as they are learning the language through the game, they are also learning the tone, because the tone itself is a very important feature of the language. Furthermore, I also tried as much as possible to emphasize the need of them to, you know, know some features that we have in the game, such as the nasal vowels. As we have here in the screen shot, I made bachoron and balogon. We have five nasal vowels in the language. And this vowel actually might be two letters, but they are fused together to be pronounced as one. We have an a, an, e, and un. So this is the un version of it. So as they are also learning the language, I'm also trying as much as possible for them to be exposed to the features we have in the language. And actually this particular feature is one of those that separates the Yoruba language to the best of my ability from every other tonal languages we have in the world. We have several tonal languages in the world, but not everyone has this particular feature of a nasal vowel stuff. So also I tried as much as possible to emphasize the feature of the misalibified consonants. We have the mi and the ni. In the example of the name I gave you, bimbo, the mi here has a tone. It is the tone that made the consonants mi a misalibified one. Though in the game, I decided not to put the tone. I decided I coined the rule for them to use the consonants to stand in as a misalibified consonants. Because I was trying as much as possible not to have an excess tone in as much as the mi and the ni could be used as a consonants. I made provision for a rule for it to also be allowed to be played as a misalibified consonants. Then also while doing the game, I emphasized on the influence of vowel harmony. The two mid vowel harmony, the mid a and the mid low, we have a and o, then we have a and o. It is only those, each of them could co-occur. So the a and the o would always co-occur. The a and the o would always co-occur. We can't have them in otherwise situations. So as a result, I had to do some research in finding which of these two counterparts has a very large distribution of lexicon. On exceptional cases where we would have o and for instance a to co-occur if when we have a decentralized word. That means that we have several words that we joined together to form a single entity or a single word. Then I also like to talk about the challenges of students. So while being a first year student in the University of Lagos, I discovered that most if not all of my colleague had problems with the autobiography and there's a kind of English language influence in the way they write as a fresh student who is just being exposed to the proper autobiography of the language. So for instance here we have the the old version or the old way of writing she which is SH. But what we have now is this the she so in the old autobiography and even those who are not really exposed to the old autobiography but have a kind of influence of the English language they will still write she like this majorly because this is how the sound is mostly being written in English. Another problem I was able to identify is that most of them can't identify she or and a from co and a respectively. So for instance if you are trying to read through a note of a year one student a first year is not exposed to the autobiography of the language such you might have a difficulty in trying to read through the notes because there will be a mixture of these six letters because each of these letters are distinctive in their own right in the language and another problem is that of the tone a lot of my junior colleague do like complain about the usage of tone so they are like if you are writing the Yoruba language uses the Latin spirit so they'll be like if they are writing the tone slows down how they do write the language and I've always tried to emphasize the fact that the tone in itself is an important feature of the language the phone is part of the language so you have to find a way to make sure you are writing the language with the tone because if you have a Latin representation of let's say IGB which could be Iba Iba Iba and Iba it is only the tone in this case that would help us to differentiate what from what except if you are trying to use your head to read in context that is another way you could you know try as much as possible to separate the semantics of such words so I guess this would be the end of my presentation thank you thank you very much it was interesting very interesting and I know a lot of questions and they will be giving them shortly right if we could have so a decor and muslim wallah on the screen I can ask them a few questions and then we can bring after that bring the previous two scholars up and then people can ask questions from the floor okay you're welcome back Professor Adelieko and Aremu and Musmala let me start with Musmala I'm very curious about how you got your students to learn how to use tone I also taught your revise a full-time scholar in the US and actually my masters thesis was about American students attitude to tone coming wants me to ask you how what's the how do you know your students what is the results at the end of your experiment experiment with them how did they eventually deal and cope with using your buttons okay so for the Indian journals rather they actually didn't use tones they were just writing like regular so we were not using tones per se but we also had classes on tones and then during language tables I tried so language table is when you just have like an informal gathering with students and you discuss and talk about topics that they've studied in class and all so what I focused on doing language tables was to work on their tones right on their knowledge of your battle marks and all so mostly I did this through music right the first thing that I worked on was how they pronounced the B and the C sounds so I used this I think is it or more bullet show or something like that one song by Olamide so and then I also use pray for me by by I forgotten his name but I use those songs because they use the B sounds and the C sounds repetitively so I asked like I would replay a particular line and then ask them to pronounce and then they did like my students did and most of them were white students so they were able to pronounce those sounds just by listening to the songs repetitively but in terms of tones yeah we had issues with that yes pray for me by Daria Taladi so in terms of tones we had issues with that and I can't say like all of them were able to perfect their understanding of that no but like some improved like for example in class like if okay with this okay so they could put this so if we ask them a question for example and then they respond you know with a different tone then we correct them right but that's you know having a special class on tones and oh no we didn't but we just tried as much as possible to correct them when they mispronounce a word or misuse a particular tone so yeah it's not I don't know how to or what suggestion I can make in terms of that it's something that even Nigerian students struggle with yeah yeah and I have a question for you I know that the standard scrabble has a limited number of tiles and when you have to put tone marks on the letters in your experience of having to create a one for you robot you would significantly have to increase the number of tiles you put in there how did you manage to cut them down to a manageable size that's the first question second part is how have students or friends of yours or people of your generation reacted to the game thank you very much first of all that was actually one of the challenges I had because I was trying to force the English version of the game on that of the uruba ball as I was developing it I discovered it's won't work it's won't work because of the features that exist in the uruba language the tones especially one is that it's another feature that cause that is that the cost of that can't finish off the uruba language doesn't allow a final word consonants so as a result I was forced to expand the board and the normal English crossword game has 100,000 but that of the uruba the one I did add like 123,000 because I had to take into consideration the tones final word consonants and every other feature like that and the reaction of people had I've actually been encouraging but the game is actually not out majorly because of financial difficulties for now but you know it's not because of yeah then we also try to have as possible to get yeah I have a prototype then after you people play with okay thank you very much um professor a deco couple of questions for you and there how do we develop somebody says this doesn't accurately how do we develop technical terms for uruba in all disciplines I'm aware professor will be presented a proposal to vice-chancellors of the university situated in the states where uruba is spoken as a first language the proposal was killed by the native attitude to those of those vcs and many uruba scholars how do we solve this problem yeah this continues like many things I've heard from many people saying that the reason why uruba is not growing as it should and you've mentioned much of it before is that we don't have we have not made the language fit with all the different ways in which we live in these modern times so how do we do that I do not think that's very hard to do if uruba is not a special language the way if you look at the language ecology in Nigeria today even in uruba speaking war in urubasic speaking section of the country uruba is like many other languages it's not the language of discovery it's not the language of teaching it used to be the language of religion it's not even the language of religion anymore used to be the language of major religions used to be the major development and language so these are developments that if uruba language had to be spoken every day today all this would not be difficult people will invent words daily people invent words daily look radio we spoke about radio yesterday there is a word for web there's a word for internet there is there is a systematic way in which words are loan a borrowed into the app came into the language somebody was referring to a wobbly actually a wobbly I know you learn wrote a handbook which they published I think four years ago or three years ago with quarter-stage university press on how to write these things systematically a wobbly is a linguist so he knows how to do things systematically so it's it's not because of its wheel which don't use the language for knowledge production so it does be it does the app that it's like Latin now that's what it's going to become unfortunately the difficulty is not in the nature of the language I've had people say with the light uruba language in the language of a 90 I've had people say that to me yeah so yeah I think most of the young also asked what academic is doing to enrich your language with words to capture mathematics science technology etc I think you sort of answer that right yeah fucking they had a technical volume they are a faculty lady he has actually had a dictionary of technical terms in your bar at if I remember Ford Foundation in the 1980s there was all all all the translated everything that so it's not a difficult thing to do we can't we don't have to reinvent the wheel but we are just not using it what was the point of a language that nobody speaks right um this question I asked Muslim earlier what you experience using two marks to eight teaching pronunciation I want to ask every other panelist as well have you ever used your bar to teach especially non-native speakers and what are your strategies that you used to be able to get them to to learn to use it properly or what's your experience in any way yeah I want I taught you about you like Muslim at Florida how long before you got there I spent four years teaching Yoruba as a grad student at Florida that's what put me through grad school there so I know what I'm talking about in terms of teaching we had foreign language there was a large volume color my mother about this then the foreign language services of the U.S. State Department has two thick volumes also with audio you have audio tapes that you have had that time that and we use language lab to teach tones it's difficult as you said it's difficult but it takes a lot of practice to be able to to be able to get it I tell students that one main difference is English language is tone-timed that is stress-timed Yoruba language is tone-timed in other words it carries a lot of differential weight more than in English although all languages of the world have different uses of tone but in Yoruba language and others it's particularly significant because it carries differential meaning right I have another question here Xavier Lee says I have a general question about the role of interference I studied the ways that orthographical systems respond to other languages as I mentioned these languages often exist in a relation to power domination subordinate et cetera Haitian Creole for example has experienced a number of orthographic changes responding to the dominant position of French and at times American English throughout the 21st 20th century the goal is to create a sense of a middle ground literacy between the two languages so how do you all manage this level of interference in your work are you adamant about the standardize Yoruba orthography or do you think other kinds of hybrid writing systems should be embraced I think that's a very good question Miss Malawood and Kali as well in case they have anything to say to this thoughts? I do not want to dominate this discussion but this has been my experience Yoruba has been Yoruba language writing system compared to other Nigerian language writing system except for Hausa has survived as done as well as it has done up until the last 30 40 years because there was a will to come around these Crowder system a Samuel Crowder original system that we all which we all embraced it's not because it's convenient the way Crowder is not easy to me as an Ijebu speaker in Ijebu when I was going to school it was hard but that's what the way it was with the school system and the social system who are less around that Crowder system so it's a matter of will someone has to give up something in order for this standardized system to follow technically these days I usually don't listen to complaints about technicality iPad iPhone Android even on Android you just press your E press your E down it gives all the variety just choose one I just don't get it honestly I don't sorry go on the same thing with iOS Mac OS I change to Mac because of that Mac is inbuilt you write it once it goes on your phone on your mail and Mac is based in California it's not even in letters so I just don't get it it's difficult actually there is a way in which this question has already been answered actually by the fact that the Crowder Autography and what we've done with it over the years is actually also a compromise because it builds on what already exists as a Latin script and then adds slap modifications to it in order to deal with the tone and other things there's a question for Miss Wood here from Akinadeshoka he says he put me on the spot and I did actually answer in the Q&A but I'll say it here that Widow Books will publish manuscripts, good manuscripts as and when we find them so we are very committed to this process and the related publication which is Akin Review we have over the years nearly every edition published some content either fiction or poetry in Yoruba even though that is and we are pushing the envelope there because that's a publication that's for that's for everybody regardless of language but because of this I mean Professor Adea spoke here now about will yes that commitment has to be there when the commitment is there you will seize upon the opportunities when you get them so that's the approach that's my commitment and it's a commitment that I've always had you understand and it's probably what made you invite me so and even though I'm new at Widow Books myself and Lelash Tunein who founded it we are committed to that but we're not getting many manuscripts coming through that are of sufficient quality at the moment and yes we are open to republishing some of these canonical Yoruba texts but with that you have to deal with things like rights, legacies wills and so on and so forth but when all the elements align and we can we will be happy to and as for my own writing I'm always writing in the Yoruba language I'm always writing in the Yoruba language but I have to hold my hands up and say that I don't think anyone has ever read any fiction from me telling the Yoruba language so maybe I better go and tighten my belt after this and just try and just do it as they say yeah general question I have here the name of the ok Moradion what should be the role of institutions in disseminating skills for writing and reading Yoruba and which institutions should be involved and how should they be involved I don't know if anyone wants to answer the questions I mean earlier institutions if I may but before anybody continues the dictionaries used to be institutions anyway it should be the place you go to to find an authority I have the faculty book as well it's not very satisfactory as many have mentioned the word Yoruba has written without their criticism it's not my favorite Yoruba dictionary is this one by Abraham which he did many many years ago Yoruba it has not just the meaning of words it gives examples and proverbs and other places but what other institutions do we need to have and how do we empower them to be able to continue to help Yoruba language develop anybody can take that schools as far as I'm concerned schools at all levels schools at all levels right ok Miss Wood do you want to say something and I have a follow up question on that you know when you came into the English language adopted for the Oxford English dictionary there's an institution there's a body that decides oh these are the words that are last year some new ones came in we need a body like that for the Yoruba language but we're in a country now where to even try to advance things with regards to your everything is politicized if we can find a way things are committed in Nigeria now that to promote culture to promote your language is seen as an attack on someone else if we can find an atmosphere for this if we can someone always feels attacked even though you're just pushing your own your own cart so we do need an institution like that but I don't know if it's possible in the current atmosphere I think we're going to need scholars to actually lead the way in this respect and especially for the scholars working in Nigeria they have their own challenges also but it's something for us to walk towards when the time is amenable for that kind of body that will also be insulated from whatever the political atmosphere is definitely and if I can add to what Dr. Adequah said earlier people invent words daily this was going to be part of my presentation which I did not have enough time for Yoruba language is actually a sin of wonder when you look at the when you listen to the music now Barnaby is now a global superstar he sings a lot in Yoruba and there are phrases coming out of the lyrics that even the Yoruba person millennial on the streets of Lagos is just encountering for the first time and they suddenly want to know what is the meaning of that so all of this is helping to replenish the language so the language is self replenishing and in exile I mean we didn't call it exile but I lived in the UK for over 20 years and I didn't think about it until years later but we created language we invented language and no one called the meeting there was no communication and yet there were words there were Yoruba words, Yoruba terms and phrases that emerged out of that experience some other is one of those words they all in one baby girl so it's meaning it's language it's also tender humor some other and then those words then find the ways back to the homeland so Yoruba is very elastic very dynamic acrobatic we just have to have the commitment to this language and we'll see it will surprise us and just to add to I think oh okay should I continue yeah yeah yeah yeah just to add to that I think like we should really appreciate how social media has helped proliferation of Yoruba language you know and how trending topics and just catchphrases like you get a lot of people learning Yoruba and just understanding Yoruba even beyond the way word is used they try as much as possible to understand the context and I can just okay for example big brother Nainja is on and all that and you find you know some of the housemates using certain words and people want to know oh what does this mean can you all hear me yes we can people want to know what does this mean and this is a show that people all over the world are watching right so if somebody in the housemate says a particular word in Yoruba they say something in Yoruba and then they interpret they have the required to interpret it immediately in that way like people then you know they learn something new about Yoruba language and I even saw there's this shirt I saw somebody you know they just they put this phrase like on a T-shirt and just that like it's something really cool right but then you just use and it goes back to what Miss Mola would said about how elastic Yoruba language is right that you know people see it as something cool but then it's also a way of dispersing the language it's a way of dispersing what does this mean it means I am not around but then it's just so I think Yoruba is a really beautiful language and then we should really appreciate how social media has helped although I also agree that there has to be a body that would really standardize the language and yeah there will be the colloquial format but then we should also have that structure in place just to one of those words low-battern all these terms low-battern everyone uses that in Nigeria now regardless of their ethnic background so on social media you have this happening and people no longer apologize for the use of these Yoruba language in this way and you have it actually gaining wider currency even beyond people who are native Yoruba and so it's wonderful just to add to just to okay there is an organization called Yoruba Academy which I don't know how much is grown so far but the organization is being set up to kind of provide this kind of authority space to be able to help monitor and curate both of Yoruba language and I don't see the activity I heard about it just a couple of months ago and I'm sure we'll be hearing more about them in the future just to add to what Prof said on school being an institution I think one of the challenges we have with school as an institution is that of policy and implementation as much as I can remember the national policy on education provided that from pre-primary to primary three there about language of the immediate environment should be used in school but that is not what we have now English is being used so for a place like southern Nigeria where Yoruba language is the dominant language Yoruba language should be used from the pre-primary to primary three there about I can't really figure out the actually also bring conversations of spaces where we have multiple languages especially in the north and the east though I would say for four days like the dominant languages but we also have spaces like Yola I was hearing some languages few months ago that there are also some languages that dominate some spaces in Yola so I think we also have issues with implementation and policy but the legacy of government is trying as much as possible because of time we have to call somebody else to ask sorry about that the language policy 1973 has been changed I've tried to follow up and I've noticed that it has been changed and replaced I mean even when it was not changed there are a lot of problems that we have to do we have to bring in Craig Cornelius to ask a question Professor Deco I'm going to give you a chance to answer I just want to have him ask the question that all of us respond and then we can move towards the end so if we can get Craig to come on the screen while we're doing that Professor Deco you can wrap up your comments I'm right here I just wanted to comment briefly or ask briefly is one of the barriers to the use of diacritics and tone marks the fact that it's difficult to use on keyboards on the devices you have yeah it is one of the biggest problems but that is a modern problem there is also a couple of problems we mentioned yesterday which include the policies of governments that kind of the local language use over time and the kind of cultural issues and the globalization influence of English that also made it harder or made people lose interest in actually using it to write and to so everything adds together people lost interest and then the tools of technology when technology came also were not sufficient so a combination of that and these have found us in this place where we can do it and the competence to do it has also reduced so briefly do you have the contact with people who can help you with the technology issues well that is why you come in you and I have been talking about this for a couple of months I believe Unicode like I keep mentioning is one of the biggest issues because of the inability to combine the marking on top of the barrel because now we have to put one and then add the other to it sometimes when you transmit the text to another platform everything that turns the boxes or the two marks jump around so if Unicode can make that happen that you can have pre-composed Yoruba vowels that have the dot under it and then they have the two marks under it I can stay as one character the issues we have on Twitter where it's counted as different characters will not happen and the other issues that will not happen when you transmit them from Word to PDF and a number of other issues like that so there are issues that link to technology specifically which Unicode specifically can be of help with I'm not a technical expert in computer language but I know that if you use a Unicode compliant font it will transfer across like Ariel what it does is that I do not know but with Unicode I don't know I'm serious but where I know and I wanted to comment was on the daily the advancements in the language today are they being curated there were advancements 50 years ago that disappeared nobody knows where they are today because there are no dictionaries no manuals that you could refer to you mentioned I see Abraham did not speak Yoruba he used the native informant he asked someone to with his word he wrote a long English version of it that's not the Yoruba dictionary I'm sorry it's the best, it's the most voluminous it's all English all English language you cannot make any cross-reference there is nothing for us to refer to historically that for me it's really painful as a scholar because of the technique we do need the Yoruba dictionary one of the things we have been doing we call it Yoruba word.com we haven't launched it yet but I think it needs to happen and not just in book form but also online where young people can be able to access and hear the pronunciation like we have the Yoruba name.com where you can actually click and hear how it works sometimes it's not just looking at the tone marks itself but also hearing the corresponding sound and figuring out what the issue is Kali you haven't said anything for a few minutes if you have any contribution I would like really love to hear we have kind of dominated this conversation for a few minutes Kali? Well in my perspective it's very different so in South Africa of course we have a lot of this kind of conversation language pride it's something that I was educated with around Afrikaans and I'm very allergic to Afrikaans language nationalism and Afrikaans language pride my mum and her WhatsApp group talk about language innovation all the time and I just want to hear nothing about it for Afrikaans because of its historical association so I think I come with three perspectives the one is having grown up with a language for which pride was forced down my throat when I didn't want that the second one is that I'm a champion for early career scholars and I'm always looking for the barriers that early career especially early career scholars in Nigeria face to getting published and then the third thing is that the journal is actually an activist for language and for African language enrichment so I'm not at all critical of any of the things that are being said here and very appreciative of many of the presentations so I just wanted to clarify that issue about where my viewpoints come from thank you very much we have Gloria who also wants to ask a question we're rounding off shortly we're going to end at four at five o'clock we hope to end at five but we are heading towards the end Gloria if you are ready to ask a question please go on but meanwhile I find it very interesting the conversation about nationalism language nationalism and I think one of the issues we have in Nigeria is actually that issue the idea of politicizing something that should just be a cultural issue instead of a political issue when people celebrate a language or when people create schools that teach only one particular language the impression everybody gets is that there is some agenda that is being concocted to mess with the other languages that exist in the country and for a country like Nigeria that has about 500 languages it's not hard for people who understand what language is but because of our political issues we sometimes get into this discussion about why are you doing anything to further to promote a language when there are so many other languages in the country I believe that the solution would be that all languages in the country should thrive and all of them should have the space to thrive and to function in different parts of the country Luria, if you have your question you can go on, please make it very fast Hi, thank you panel, thank you for taking my question the question is very quick it's essentially should we integrate diacritics into forming new characters like a syllabary syllabary like that exists for Chinese language so just having characters which already encode the diacritical markings such as tones and nasal vowels thanks very much, we did get the last time I brought up the possibility of new scripts that is not based on a Latin script for Yoruba Professor Femmita will get really energized in his opposition to that idea I guess assuming that we are saying that the current way of writing has failed I am always open to new ways of writing language even if the Latin script remain I wrote an essay about Ndebe which is an invented script which is a syllabary as well used to write Igbo it hasn't caught on yet it was just unveiled I think about a month ago but I am interested in new ways of expressing the language obviously there are different possibilities of writing it that is not always going to be based on a Latin script it doesn't mean that we should drop the Latin script but if there are new ways of writing it that makes it easier I am interested in what anybody else has to say can I jump in here I will retire you by the way regarding that you have known that many times before you mentioned that I read your essay that piece on the new script I will wait until it is adopted in Igbo they could not even adopt the Roman script in Igbo language they couldn't coalesce like the Yoruba did because of the scholars the scholars made quick they jumped ahead of it and Igbo Igbo Anambra script Igbo script they could not come around on one script maybe this person will succeed better than us better than the past I am waiting to see that but in terms of syllabary no language is individual no person can invent it thank you I don't think they are asking to reinvent the language they invented a new way if I can come in if I can come in I think Professor Ajay Okawa is going to get himself in very hot water although he was making very good points and the thing I would like to say to call a two person is this where Igbo language is and where Yoruba language is and the journeys they have been on very different Igbo has been invented by one person it's a great achievement but you cannot say that we should jettison the Yoruba language that has been and all the work that's done over it for 200 years we succeeded in having Yoruba over 100 years ago you now want us to throw it into to follow the example I'm not sure it's a great idea thank you very much hello can you hear me actually on the script I've always tried as much as possible to give the instance of for instance let's say Chinese is the one that has a Latin script with tone people are still going to learn Chinese that way I don't think it is much of the script itself it is a battle of the language in particular the name of the language so that's my view about it that's my view about it if Chinese has a Latin script with tone and subject people are still going to learn Chinese like that so it is just more of an excuse for people to be saying we are writing the script and all I agree with you completely Miss Tadiola totally it's not a question of old people like Kola used to say we have a young guy in our camp let me quickly mention just one instance before you come in Kola a few years ago you probably know him the man involved in literary studies he's been in this business for a long time he actually asked me Akinishola's address he wanted to know how Akinishola and his colleagues came to convince Yoruba scholars to come around Yoruba Jumaru as Miss Wood said so if they couldn't even come together so that's one point the other point that I want to make that I'm really really passionate about is that let's practice we will change whether we like it or not but in usage let's keep using them so that we'll have changes please thank you very much for the contribution but let me clarify what I'm saying just for the records I never said that we should jettison what we have and it has a history and value but what I'm saying is similar to what you would see when people write Arabic for instance Arabic we know when you think of Arabic you know what it looks like on the page but there are people who write Arabic today who can write it with a Latin script they have invented new ways of writing like putting numbers and putting stuff like that Korean we know what Korean looks like but you can write Korean in other ways as well so if a new script is invented by anyone that solves some of the problems that the Latin script does not solve as still remain in the Latin script I'm saying I welcome it because it's a way of also growing the language by giving new people ways to write the language you also expand the scope of the number of people who speak it who speak it or who use it I don't know whether it's going to succeed or thrive or take over the Ibo language but the fact that some people are trying to learn to use and to write with it is a benefit for the language and that always is a positive thing when we're talking of language growth and language expansion so that is my submission okay good we are in agreement we have one more minute if we can get Louisa to come round off the events that would be great I've had a great time talking with my colleagues, my friends, my mentees my mentors my friends from all around the place I really enjoyed the conversation thank you thank you Dr. Koti and thank you I'm going to continue thinking and talking about these matters and I know you are as well and I hope we continue this conversation outside of this space we're going to have Louisa give the vote of thanks and my work is done thank you very much thank you Kola well it has been I'm the Louisa Alina Mangoni, head of the Asian and African collections department here at the British Library and it has been a real pleasure to be here with all of you at this absolutely fascinating symposium what I found particularly interesting in this two-base symposium and really engaging is the richness and diversity of the professional and personal experiences that all speakers have shared with us to make their point and the difficulty in finding an easy answer to all the issues and challenges that have been raised during the discussion but I think we are concluding this symposium with a better and clearer understanding of the complexity of Yoruba as a formal language and I really love the mention of the mathematics of Yoruba yesterday and definitely a much better informed awareness of all the challenges associated to its writing system across different sectors and uses we have seen that the academy voices the educational and teaching experiences practices in publishing in creative production and in social media today was diverse it was created to the view of Yoruba and the use of a computer and initial suggestions on how these challenges can be addressed to facilitate the writing of Yoruba in publishing and on digital platforms several speakers have also addressed the question of literacy education in universities but especially in primary and secondary schools that was really important and how to better support teaching and literacy education of Yoruba informal ways like in schools in the academia but also in new and creative ways that can engage fully and more a wider community of speakers so reflecting on the richness and diversity of the practices and experiences that we have heard today I really hope that this symposium will sparkle new conversations and exchanges across the academic education professional and creative sectors as well as online and in all places where there are Yoruba speakers for people who care about the future of this language and are keen to find solutions that will promote and support the Yoruba language even further I really like the idea that we should support the development of the language for the future I would also like to highlight that the Lagos Studies Association partner of this symposium has an annual conference in Nigeria where some of these conversations will continue to happen here in the UK Africa Rights who is also a partner of this conference also organizes an annual event focused on literature and language you can follow these events through their channels their website and social media and Kodatu was on himself continues to work with others in language technology to find solutions to many of the issues raised so far and we definitely hope to continue having a close dialogue with him Books and other relevant materials can be found in the British Library African and Asian section for anyone interested in further research including our discovery channels on the British Library website and our Asian African Studies blog and there are a few blogs written by Kola about Yoruba collections at the library I think in the chat we will have some links and we will be sending more links on email as Marilyn mentioned at the start of today's session this symposium has been the result of Kola Tubason's initial idea and his determination to work together a stellar group of speakers and contributors and I think you all had a very good idea of what it means and thanks again to Kola to Dr. Mariam Wallace and other libraries colleagues who supported the event thanks to all speakers and contributors it has been really great to hear your experiences and to our partners the Lagos Association and Africa writes and finally I just have a communication to say that the recordings of today's and yesterday's events will be uploaded to the British Library's YouTube channel and this should be available next week when the recordings go live we will send an email to everyone registered to let you know and we also send I think the links on the chat so I would at 7.01 we are at the end of the symposium I hope you have all enjoyed the event and thanks again to all panelists, organisers and all of you who have joined us today for this symposium thank you