Yoruba language

High school (ages 12+)
People & Society

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/yoruba-language

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the speaker demographics?Approximately 50 million native speakers and 2 million L2 speakers
2. What is the linguistic classification?Yoruboid branch of the Niger-Congo language family
3. How many people speak Yoruba?About 50 million people speak Yoruba as their first language, and another 2 million people learn it as a second language.
4. Why does Yoruba have different tones?Yoruba uses high, mid, and low tones on its syllables, and these tones help to tell words apart, so the same letters can mean different things.

Niger-Congo Language Family: A vast and diverse group of languages spoken across a wide swathe of Africa, characterized by shared grammatical and lexical features.
Pluricentric Language: A language that has developed multiple standard varieties, each associated with a distinct national or regional center.
Liturgical Language: A language used in religious services, rituals, and ceremonies, often distinct from everyday spoken language.
Phonemic Tone: A tonal feature in a language where the pitch of a syllable can change the meaning of a word.