Learning Yoruba with my daughter

“Ikùn.”

“Ikùn,” I repeat, pointing to the illustration of a brown stomach under a turquoise shirt on the page before us. My daughter mimics the picture by raising her top and revealing her tummy. She pokes her pillow-soft belly. Ikùn. Tummy.

My father overhears us and corrects me. “Ikùn. Eeeeee kuuhn”. He says the word over and over, urging me to stress it in the correct way. It is less clumsy coming from him. He wants me to lean on the “n” that is both there and, simultaneously, not there. There is a faint “g” sound in its echo, but the intonation evades me.

My daughter is 18 months old. I am 37. We are reading My First Words: Yoruba by Koli & Olum. Together we are learning to speak Yoruba, our mother tongue. Does this seem strange to you, that I cannot speak my own language? My father is a Lagosian, and my mother hails from Ijebu Ode. I am Yoruba from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, yet I stutter and stumble and struggle to produce the words I need.

But I do understand the language. Here is my proof: if I were kidnapped and the kidnappers happened to be speaking Yoruba, I would know what was going on. If these Yoruba kidnappers needed me to translate their Yoruba to English in order to communicate with my fellow hostages, I would be able to help, mostly. However, if my fellow captives asked me to relay a message to the Yoruba kidnappers (in this scenario, our kidnappers do not speak a drop of English), then we would have a problem.

Basically, I do not speak Yoruba fluently, or even semi-fluently. I can just about manage to say, “I want to eat”; “— to sleep; “— to sit” (“mo fẹ́́ jẹun”; “mo fẹ́ sùn”; “mo fẹ́ jókòó”, if you were curious). But any sentence more complex than that requires a similar sort of effort one might use to push a boulder uphill.

Here are my excuses: I spent my early childhood in England, and though my parents spoke Yoruba regularly to and around us, they did not force us to respond in Yoruba. They were under the impression that we would learn the language organically. In fact, my mother was so confident that I would one day speak Yoruba, that when the opportunity came to pick a native language as one of my subjects at my secondary school — a boarding school in Nigeria — she urged me to select Hausa, a popular tongue but not ours, and one from a different linguistic family. Hausa was purportedly the easier language to learn, and she wanted me to get a good grade. Spoiler alert: I still don’t understand a lick of Hausa. If my kidnapper were Hausa, I would be screwed.

Being a British-Nigerian — or a Nigerian-Brit, depending on who is doing the describing — who only speaks English is a curious thing. I recently stumbled across a clip of President Trump addressing the Liberian president, Joseph Boakai, and asking where he learnt to speak such “beautiful English”. The exchange felt familiar.

I, too, have been complimented on my “beautiful English”, on how well-spoken I am, as if I had overcome tremendous odds to become fluent in the language of the white man. English is the language I was raised in, the language I write in; the language I dream in — which, we’re told, is the true test of whether a language is native to you.

Writing in Yoruba is becoming a lost art; what is effortless in conversation can be complicated on the page

A brief history lesson: Nigeria is a patchwork country. And the quilter? Britain. Now imagine that each of the squares in this patchwork blanket has its own culture, its own belief system and, most importantly here, its own language. Even without colonial pressure, once Nigeria was stitched together, English became essential for communication between the various tribes. Even if I had never lived a day in England, I would still speak English.

But, I digress. This piece is not designed to unravel our complicated histories. Rather, it is a public declaration of my love of, and desire for, a language that evades me. This desire is somewhat fresh. I did not feel this hunger as a child or as a teenager. It snuck up on me more recently, in 2011, and manifested itself in a poem I titled “má tan ra ẹ”. Since then, the need to use Yoruba in my work as a writer has grown. But the journey has been neither easy, nor smooth.

I met a reader in the states a few years ago who asked why I had not translated a Yoruba sentence in my first novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer. I explained why. Her response was, “So you don’t want us to understand!” before stomping off. I was a little taken aback, and a little saddened. My aim is not to obscure. On the contrary, I want readers to delve into the world I have presented and its culture. I want them to learn about this language that is musical and meaningful and heavy. Come, come join me and wonder at its beauty.

Despite her reaction, when writing my latest novel Cursed Daughters, I realised I had become bold. I added Yoruba as and when I needed to. Yes, I had to rely heavily on my family to correct my awkward attempts. And it was not so easy for them either, due to the use of accents in written Yoruba. Writing in Yoruba is slowly becoming a lost art; what is effortless in conversation can be quite complicated on the page. The majority of my helpers had to sound out the words in order to figure out which accents went where.

Yoruba accents are taught to us based on the first three notes of the musical scale: Do, Re, Mi. How does this work? Well, a word spelt in the same way can have very different meanings depending on the tone used and the stress placed on the different letters. For example, “ògùn” means medicine; “ogun”, however, means war; “ógun” means stab; and “ogún” means 20. These little accents effectively alter the whole meaning of what you are saying, but also sound different to the familiar ear.

Now, just as a music student will learn that “Do” is low in the octave, this is also absorbed by the Yoruba speaker. If a letter has a “Do” sound then it has a lower register and the accent tick goes downwards. “Re” is a middle register so no accent is needed, whereas “Mi” is a higher register so the accent will tick upwards.

Yoruba words also have little dots under some letters, which indicate when a letter changes its sound. When this happens in English you are left to flounder — you have to learn all the rules and exceptions. So “s” sounds different in “snake” and in “sugar”. But in Yoruba, when the “s” sound transforms into “sh”, a dot is placed under the ṣ.

As for how and when I switch to Yoruba in my writing, this occurs more organically than you would think, considering I am essentially a non-Yoruba speaker. All my life I have been surrounded by people who slip seamlessly between Yoruba and English — and who often cobble the two together into what is now termed “Yoruba-English”. When their Yoruba fails them, they include English words; when English is insufficient, they turn to Yoruba. I have similar instincts. There are moments when I just know that what I am trying to say would be better said in Yoruba.

Yoruba is obsessed with proverbs. They are low-hanging fruit when it comes to conveying meaning, giving warnings and the like

There are also those instances when only Yoruba would work. In Cursed Daughters, after my character Èbùn gives birth, she is told “ẹ kú ewu ọmọ”, which means “Congratulations on surviving the dangers of childbirth”. The phrase “ẹ kú” is used often: congratulations on your marriage, congratulations on your party, congratulations on sitting (don’t ask me why). Later in the novel, Grandma East tells Èníyìí, “kú ìgbá dùn o” (which could also be written as “ẹ kú ìgbá dùn o”, if one sought to be more formal or if one was addressing an older person) which translates to “Congratulations on your enjoyment” — basically, “keep enjoying yourself”.

Yoruba is obsessed with proverbs. They are low-hanging fruit when it comes to conveying meaning, giving warnings and the like. Even the insults are multi-layered. “Olórí burúkú”, which many will tell you means “idiot”, literally translates as “a person whose head is broken/wicked”. I think we can all agree that this expression is far more devastating than any two-word English phrase.

In my novel I also included the line: “A ò mọ̀ nnkan tí obìnrin má dì kó tó gbélé ọkọ.” It translates as, “We do not know what a woman will become until she marries.” I heard this phrase over a decade ago and it felt right to work it into this tale about a family of women who obsess over love and/or marriage. But there are many different ways to express this sentiment in Yoruba, and many different ways to translate it.

The literal translation of “A ò mọ ǹkan tí obìnrin máa dì kó tó gbélé ọkọ” is actually, “We do not know what a woman will become until she gets to her husband’s home”. You could say instead, “A kò mọ ohun tí obìnrin yóò di títí tí ó fi ṣe ìgbéyàwó”, which roughly translates as “We do not know what a woman will become until she becomes a wife”. Same sentiment, many forms; each carrying something intricate beneath the words. The etymology of the word “iyàwó” (wife) is itself interesting, especially since the first half of the word, “iyà”, means “suffering”.

This labour — learning the language, trying to speak it, placing the accents, trying to work out which sentence will work — it is a labour of love. Because not being able to access the language is like being locked out of one’s own culture. English is at my fingertips, but Yoruba is buried deep in my subconscious.

So my husband and I teach our daughter, and we teach ourselves. I feel myself growing. Perhaps I will never be “fluent”, but one day I hope to casually converse in Yoruba. And, maybe through my work, I can be part of the effort to keep written Yoruba alive.

Oyinkan Braithwaite is the author of “Cursed Daughters” (Atlantic Books)

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram