Oyo

Level: Beginner Audience: Family / all ages Geo: Nigeria → Oyo (Ibadan, Oyo town and across Yorubaland)

Yoruba counting is one of the most interesting number systems in the world: above ten it builds numbers by adding and subtracting from twenties. But every child starts with the first ten, and these are the standard cardinal forms recorded in the Wikipedia Yoruba numerals table. Remember the three tones: an acute mark (á) is high, a grave mark (à) is low, no mark is mid. Say them like music, not like English.

Number	Yoruba	Notes
1	ọ̀kan	For counting objects one by one, ení is also used
2	èjì
3	ẹ̀ta	Open ẹ
4	ẹ̀rin	Open ẹ
5	àrún
6	ẹ̀fà	Open ẹ
7	èje
8	ẹ̀jọ	Open ẹ and open ọ
9	ẹ̀sán	Open ẹ
10	ẹ̀wá	Open ẹ

[Audio: a relative counting from 1 to 10 slowly, then quickly — never a fake audio URL] [Image: ten cocoa pods, one for each number — placeholder only]

Hear the pattern

Notice that almost every number begins on a low tone (the grave mark). That gives Yoruba counting its steady downbeat: ọ̀kan, èjì, ẹ̀ta, ẹ̀rin, àrún. Then listen for the few high tones that break the rhythm: àrún, ẹ̀sán, ẹ̀wá all finish high, like a question. Children pick this up fastest by clapping once per number.

A note on "one"

Wikipedia records that up to 30 Yoruba keeps separate forms for counting things, inherited from counting cowrie shells, so you will hear ení for "one" when someone is counting objects out loud, and ọ̀kan when they are naming the number. Both are right. When you later meet méjì (two) or mẹ́ta (three) after a noun, as in ọmọ méjì, "two children", that is a third set, the forms used to count nouns. This module keeps to the cardinal forms; the others come at Intermediate level.

Practice in Oyo

Count the steps up Bower's Tower (you will lose your place; everyone does). Count brown roofs from the top (you will give up). Count the yams a trader puts in your bag at Bodija Market: that one you can finish, and the trader will be pleased to hear it in Yoruba.

Only the forms on the Wikipedia Yoruba numerals table are given. Tone marks follow that table; a relative's pronunciation wins.

Level: Beginner Audience: Family / all ages Geo: Nigeria → Oyo (Ibadan, Oyo town, Ogbomoso and across Yorubaland)

Yoruba has roughly 50 million speakers, and the written standard taught in schools is based on the Oyo and Ibadan dialects, so the words below are exactly the ones a child will hear in Oyo State. Yoruba has three tones: high is marked with an acute accent (á), low with a grave accent (à), and mid is left unmarked. The dotted letters ẹ and ọ are open vowels (like the e in "bet" and the o in "hot"). Tone changes meaning, so the marks are kept here. For greetings (Ẹ káàárọ̀, Ẹ káàbọ̀) see the Lagos module; this one is about the people in the house.

Yoruba	English	Notes
ìyá	mother	Also a respectful word for any older woman; Wiktionary
bàbá	father	Also a respectful word for any older man; Wiktionary
ẹ̀gbọ́n	elder sibling	Any older brother or sister, and by extension an older cousin or friend; marks are community-attested (Preply, Learn Yoruba with Eniola)
àbúrò	younger sibling	Any younger brother or sister; Wiktionary
ọmọ	child	Also "offspring"; ọmọdé means a young child; Wiktionary

[Audio: a relative saying each word slowly, then at home pace — never a fake audio URL] [Image: a family photo labelled with these five words — placeholder only]

Why there is no word for "brother" or "sister"

Yoruba does not sort siblings by boy and girl first. It sorts them by age. Your older sister and your older brother are both ẹ̀gbọ́n; your younger ones are both àbúrò. To say "elder sister" you add obìnrin (female): ẹ̀gbọ́n obìnrin. To say "younger brother" you add ọkùnrin (male): àbúrò ọkùnrin. Children in Oyo call older cousins, and even older family friends, ẹ̀gbọ́n out of respect. This is the same age-respect that puts ẹ in front of a greeting to an elder.

Put them in a sentence

• Ìyá mi — my mother
• Bàbá mi — my father
• Ẹ̀gbọ́n mi — my older sibling
• Àbúrò mi — my younger sibling
• Ọmọ mi — my child (what a parent says of you)

The little word mi means "my" and follows the noun.

Practice tip

Draw a family tree with your child and label every person with one of the five words. Then ask an elder to say each one so you can hear the tones. For ẹ̀gbọ́n in particular, listen for the low start and the high finish; it is the word children most often say with flat tones.

Only forms attested on Wiktionary or widely used teaching sites are given. Spellings without tone marks are common in text messages; learn the marked forms first. A relative's pronunciation wins.

Long ago, when animals and people still shared the same roads, Ìjàpá the tortoise lived in a small farm village a short walk from Oyo town, where the Alaafin has his palace. Ìjàpá was clever. Everybody said so, and nobody said it more often than Ìjàpá himself. But he had one weakness that was bigger than his shell: he hated hard work, and he loved to be admired.

One dry-season evening, a sound came rolling over the fields from the direction of town. Gun-gun, gun-gun, gùn-gùn-gun. It was the drummers of Oyo, practising on the talking drums for a great feast. The drum could rise and fall like a voice, and the people of the village stopped their cooking to listen.

"When the feast comes," said the old farmer Baba Alábi, "the best drummer in all the villages will play before the Alaafin himself."

Ìjàpá's eyes grew round. To be admired by a whole town! "I shall be that drummer," he announced.

"You?" said the goat. "You have never held a drumstick."

"Details," said Ìjàpá.

The next morning he walked to town and found the drummers' compound. The master drummer, a tall quiet man called Àyàn, was teaching three boys the same beat over and over: gun-gun-gun, gun-gun-gun. For a whole hour. Ìjàpá yawned until his jaw clicked.

"Master Àyàn," he said, "I am a quick learner. Skip the boring part and teach me the beat that makes the Alaafin smile."

Àyàn did not look up. "There is no such beat. There is only the drum, the hand and the days. Come and sit with the boys."

Ìjàpá did not come and sit with the boys. He had a better idea.

He went home and dug up his own drum, an old one his grandfather had left behind, and he fed a parrot a handful of palm kernels and said, "Friend parrot, you can copy any sound. Sit inside my drum. When I tap the top, you make the sound of the master's drumming. The Alaafin will think it is me."

The parrot, who liked palm kernels very much, agreed.

On the day of the feast, the village drummers lined up in the great open space before the palace. The three boys played first: gun-gun-gun, gun-gun-gun, steady and true, and the crowd nodded. Then Ìjàpá waddled forward with his grandfather's drum, bowed very low, and tapped.

The sound that came out was beautiful. It rose and fell exactly like Àyàn's playing. The crowd gasped. The Alaafin leaned forward in his seat.

Then Ìjàpá, enjoying himself, tapped faster. And faster. And faster still. His hands flew. But the parrot inside could only copy what it had heard, and it had heard an evening practice, slow and careful. So the drum played slowly while Ìjàpá's hands beat like rain on a roof.

A child in the front row laughed first. Then everyone saw it: the hands and the sound did not match. The drum went gun... gun... gun while Ìjàpá's arms whirled like a windmill. In the middle of it the parrot got bored, poked its green head out of the top of the drum, and said in Àyàn's exact voice, "There is only the drum, the hand and the days."

The square roared. Ìjàpá pulled his head into his shell and did not come out until nightfall.

When he did, Àyàn was sitting beside him in the dark.

"The parrot only said what you say," muttered Ìjàpá.

"Then you already know the lesson. You simply did not want to live inside it." Àyàn stood up. "The boys practise at sunrise. The drum will still be there."

And that is why, when a drummer plays beautifully, nobody asks how long it took. They already know.

There is only the drum, the hand and the days.

Moral: Clever shortcuts cheat you most of all. The joy of the drum, or the book, or the bicycle, lives in the days you spent learning it.

Original story for AllAboutAfrica. Ìjàpá is the tortoise trickster of countless Yoruba tales; this adventure is a new one written for diaspora children. Ask your child: what have you got good at only by doing it again and again?

Tolu was nine, and she had a notebook. Not an ordinary notebook: this one had a title on the front in her best handwriting, Things I Have Counted. Inside were the stairs in her school in Manchester (fifty-two), the ducks on the pond near Grandma's flat (eleven, or twelve if you counted the shy one), and the seats on the aeroplane to Lagos.

Now she was in Ibadan, in Oyo State, where her father had grown up, and she had a plan.

"Daddy," she said at breakfast, "how many brown roofs are there in Ibadan?"

Her father laughed so hard he nearly spilled his tea. "Nobody knows. Nobody has ever known."

"Then I will count them."

Her uncle Kunle put down his bread. "If you want to count roofs, you must go up. Today I will take you to Layipo."

Layipo, Uncle Kunle explained in the car, was the name people gave to the tall stone tower on Oke Aàre, the hill you could see from almost anywhere in the city. "The English built it in 1936 and called it Bower's Tower, after their first Resident here. We call it Layipo because of the stairs. You will see."

The hill was steep and the road twisted. At the top stood the tower, grey and square and taller than the trees. A man at the gate greeted them in Yoruba and Tolu answered, Ẹ káàárọ̀, the way Grandma had taught her, and he smiled and let them through.

Inside, the staircase went round and round and round, a tight spiral in the half dark. Tolu began to count the steps out of habit, then lost her place when a pigeon flew out past her ear. "Layipo!" said Uncle Kunle behind her. "It means something like going round and round. Now you understand the name."

Then they came out into the light.

Tolu stopped so suddenly that Uncle Kunle bumped into her. Below the tower, in every direction, as far as the hazy edge of the sky, lay roofs. Brown roofs. Rust-red roofs, chocolate roofs, roofs the colour of old pennies and wet earth, packed so close together they looked like one enormous crinkled blanket thrown over the hills.

She opened her notebook. She wrote 1. She looked up to find roof number two, and could not tell which one she had already counted.

"Uncle," she said in a small voice, "they are all the same colour."

"That is why we are famous," said Uncle Kunle. "A hundred years of iron sheets in a hundred years of rain. Every roof rusts the same honest brown."

Tolu tried a different way. She counted the roofs along one street, got to thirty-eight, and then the street disappeared behind a hill.

"There is Mapo Hall," Uncle Kunle said, pointing to a white building on its own hill. "And there, the tall one, is Cocoa House. Your great-grandfather's cocoa helped to pay for it. And over there, the green part, is the University, where your father learned to argue."

Tolu followed his finger from place to place. The roofs stopped being a number and started being a map: Grandma's area was there, near the market; the church with the loud choir was there; the road to Oyo town went away to the north.

She closed the notebook.

"You give up?" asked Uncle Kunle.

"No," said Tolu. "I am changing the title."

On the way down, going round and round, she crossed out Things I Have Counted and wrote underneath: Things I Have Seen. At the bottom of the list she added: Ibadan. All the brown roofs. Too many to count, so I looked at them instead.

What you can count to the end was never so very much. What you cannot, you must go and look at.

Moral: Some things are too big for a notebook. You get to know them by looking, by asking the people who live there, and by finding your own family's roof among them.

Original story for AllAboutAfrica. Bower's Tower really stands on Oke Aàre in Ibadan, and the city really is famous for its brown roofs. Ask your child: what have you seen that was too big to count?