Yoruba

Yoruba is the language of one of Africa's largest peoples, spoken by tens of millions in southwestern Nigeria and Benin, and it is also one of the world's great liturgical languages, the ritual tongue of the orisha traditions. Its sacred literature is oral and vast. The Ifa divination corpus is organized into 256 odu, each a chapter heading over a body of memorized verses, ese Ifa, which a trained diviner, a babalawo, learns over many years and recites to interpret the oracle's answer, a curriculum that has been compared to memorizing a library.

In 2005 UNESCO proclaimed the Ifa divination system a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Around Ifa stand the other genres of sacred speech, oriki praise poetry for gods, lineages and towns, incantatory ofo, festival songs for Sango, Ogun, Osun and the other orisha, all exploiting the language's three level tone system, which lets drums speak. The talking drum can render the tonal contour of Yoruba sentences so recognizably that praise poetry is drummed as well as sung, and a deity may be saluted by an instrument reciting his oriki. Yoruba is thus a language in which the boundary between speech, song and drumming is thin, and all three are modes of prayer.

The Atlantic slave trade carried Yoruba speech into the Americas, where it survived as a liturgical register inside the diaspora religions. In Cuba the descendants of Yoruba captives, known there as Lucumi, kept the songs, prayers and praise names of the orisha in a ritual language, also called Lucumi, which preserves large amounts of Yoruba vocabulary and song text within Santeria, the Regla de Ocha.

In Brazil the Candomble houses of the Nago and Ketu nations likewise pray and sing to the orixas in a Yoruba derived liturgical register, and terreiro communities in Bahia have maintained it for two centuries. In both cases the ritual language ceased to be a spoken vernacular and became something like church Latin, learned in initiation, sung in ceremony, and prized precisely for its fixity. Since the late twentieth century, growing contact between diaspora practitioners and Nigerian teachers has fed a movement of relearning, with priests studying standard Yoruba to deepen or correct the inherited ritual register. The traffic now runs both ways, with academies in Havana, Salvador, Lagos and the United States teaching Yoruba as a sacred language to initiates worldwide, an African liturgical language with a genuinely global congregation.