The words arrive smoothly, effortlessly, with the polished cadence of someone educated in Nigeria’s finest schools. They are articulate. They are precise. They are, almost invariably, English.
Gather a group of young professionals in Lagos or any othe place today and you will hear conversations flowing in flawless British-inflected English.
Gather their parents, and the language shifts, Yoruba proverbs, the rich idioms of everyday speech, the tonal music of a language built on pitch and nuance. Gather their children, and the English returns, but thinner now, less grounded, unaccompanied by the deep structures of the mother tongue that shaped their grandparents’ world.
Something is slipping away. Innocuously, steadily, without the drama of political crisis or economic collapse, the Yoruba language is fading. And those who study such things are raising alarms that grow more urgent with each passing year.
Language is not merely a tool for communication. It is the lifeblood of a people, the vessel that carries their history, their humour, their particular way of seeing the world. When a language dies, something more than vocabulary is lost. A mode of thought disappears. A unique lens through which generations understood existence is shattered, replaced by whatever lens the dominant language provides.
For Yoruba, one of Nigeria’s three major languages with approximately forty million speakers across West Africa and the diaspora, the threat comes not from external conquest but from internal neglect. The language is not being suppressed by force. It is being abandoned by choice.
In homes across the South-West, parents who grew up speaking Yoruba now address their children in English. The motivation is understandable, even well-intentioned. English is the language of power in Nigeria, the medium of education, the key to professional advancement. Parents want their children to succeed, so they give them what they believe is an advantage. They speak to them in English. They encourage English responses. They correct Yoruba expressions as if they were mistakes.
The irony cuts deep. Many of these parents lack fluency in the very language they promote. Their English is functional but not rich, adequate for basic communication but incapable of expressing the full range of human thought and feeling. Their children, exposed to neither language fully, grow up speaking something thinner than either English without depth, Yoruba without foundation. They become fluent in neither, impoverished in both.
The rot extends beyond the home. In schools across the region, children face active discouragement from speaking their mother tongue. Teachers punish pupils caught speaking “vernacular,” a term that carries centuries of colonial baggage, implying that indigenous languages are somehow lesser, inappropriate for serious contexts, suitable only for the playground and the market.
Professor Timothy Adeyemi Akanbi of Ekiti State University delivered the 101st inaugural lecture of his institution on precisely this crisis. Titled “Language: A Structural and Aesthetic Exposition of Human Language: The Yoruba Example,” his lecture laid out the dimensions of the threat with scholarly precision and evident anguish.
Akanbi described a language fighting a two-front battle: in homes where parents have surrendered, and in government policies that have abandoned the cause. He noted with dismay that Nigeria’s National Language Policy, which once mandated mother-tongue instruction in early education, has been effectively reversed. Research consistently shows that children taught in their native language perform better academically than those taught strictly in English. Yet the policy that would enable this advantage has been allowed to lapse.
The professor’s recommendations were practical and urgent: make Yoruba compulsory in primary and secondary schools across the South-West. Reintroduce mother-tongue instruction for young children. Publish more Yoruba textbooks and learning materials. Encourage parents to speak Yoruba at home. Require a credit pass in Yoruba for university admission through WAEC and NECO.
These are not radical proposals. They are the basic infrastructure of language preservation, the minimum required to keep a language alive across generations. Yet implementing them would require political will, educational reform, and a shift in cultural attitudes that has so far proved elusive.
Perhaps the most painful symbol of the decline is found in the palaces of the Yoruba people. Our Obas, the traditional rulers who embody the continuity of Yoruba culture, who sit on thrones that predate colonial intervention, who are meant to be the living guardians of tradition, many of them now converse primarily in English. Among themselves, at official functions, even in ceremonies meant to celebrate Yoruba heritage, English dominates.
This is not a small thing. When the custodians of culture abandon the language of that culture, they send a message more powerful than any government policy. They signal that Yoruba is for the past, English for the future. They signal that the language of the ancestors is no longer fit for the business of today.
There is bitter irony in watching the English themselves, whose language we have adopted with such enthusiasm, making genuine efforts to learn Yoruba. Scholars, diplomats, and cultural enthusiasts from Britain and America study the language, drawn by its beauty, its complexity, its status as one of the world’s great tonal languages. They recognise its value even as many native speakers discard it.
The consequences of language loss are not abstract. They manifest in real ways, in real lives. The child who cannot speak to their grandmother in her own tongue loses access to a lifetime of wisdom stored in that language. The young professional who cannot understand proverbs at a family gathering feels the distance between themselves and their heritage. The community that loses its language loses the unique way its ancestors understood concepts like time, relationship, respect, and obligation.
Yoruba is particularly rich in these conceptual treasures. Its system of proverbs encodes generations of practical wisdom. Its tonal structure, three distinct tones that change meaning with pitch, teaches the ear to listen differently, to attend to nuances that non-tonal languages cannot convey. Its kinship terminology maps relationships with a precision that English cannot match. All of this is threatened when the language falls silent.
Experts argue that preservation requires more than sentimental attachment. Indigenous languages must gain practical relevance in the modern world. This means incorporating them into technology, developing software and applications in Yoruba, creating online content that attracts young users. It means broadcasting major news in Yoruba, conducting government business in Yoruba, ensuring that the language is seen as a tool for the future rather than a relic of the past.
Some efforts are underway. Ekiti State University has launched an online programme specifically designed to help Yoruba indigenes in the diaspora reconnect with their language. Similar initiatives exist elsewhere, small bridges across the growing gap between generations. But these efforts remain marginal compared to the scale of the threat.
Parents, ultimately, hold the most power and bear the greatest responsibility. No government policy can replace a mother speaking to her child in the language of her own mother. No school curriculum can substitute for the casual, constant immersion of family life conducted in Yoruba. The decision to speak English at home may seem like a gift of advantage, but it is also a theft—the theft of heritage, of identity, of the deep cognitive and cultural resources that come with full fluency in a mother tongue.
Communities must also act. They must celebrate language use, reward children who speak Yoruba well, create contexts where the language is associated with success and prestige rather than backwardness and limitation. Children must see their mother tongue as an asset, not a liability.
The alternative is the slow, quiet extinction that has already claimed thousands of languages worldwide. Yoruba is not yet endangered in the technical sense, it still has millions of speakers, still produces literature and music, still functions as a living language in many contexts. But the trends are clear, and they point in one direction. Each generation speaks less, knows less, passes on less. The process is gradual, almost imperceptible from year to year. Over decades, it is devastating.
The Yoruba language is fading. The warning signs are everywhere, in homes where children respond in English to Yoruba questions, in schools where “vernacular” remains a punishable offence, in palaces where Obas address each other in borrowed tongues. The question is whether enough people will notice before fading becomes disappearance, before the language that shaped millions of lives across centuries becomes another entry in the catalogue of what was lost.
