I feel weird when people congratulate me for understanding, speaking and writing Yoruba. It’s like congratulating my parents for being ‘decent human beings’* and me for learning how to speak their language.
I’m from a kind of one-language family. The both of my parents are from the same state, and while their dialects differ and I do kind of understand both, it was relatively easy for me to pick up the language as they both speak the standardised Yoruba.
That said, I never made any real attempt to polish my understanding and speaking of the language till I was about 14 years old - my fifth year in secondary school when my dad completely refused to communicate with us in English. If we needed anything, we’d have to go to mom first to ask what to say and how to say it, go to dad, parrot what was said back to him, watch him smile, correct our inflections and pronunciations and tell us exactly what we were saying before he’d give what was needed. My spending two months in Ibadan after I graduated from secondary school and finding myself surrounded by people that also chose to speak only Yoruba to me most times also forced me to learn.
Don’t get me wrong, these situations made me want to learn, and also taught me some words, but I did good by joining websites, and speaking to everyone I knew could understand the language regularly.
All of this bearing in mind the immense opportunities I had growing up - my parents spoke the language to me and I was surrounded by people that did as well. I have friends back home that will forever call me an egun** and they could be right, but when I meet people and they express shock at my ability to speak and use me as a yardstick to measure other people’s ‘Yoruba-ness’, it makes me feel very small.
Growing up, many of us didn’t think it was cool to either understand and/or speak our languages, we’d even English-ify words just so people could think we were beyond any help. Others simply had no one interested in teaching them their language. We all have different backgrounds and when parents and peers (it’s almost always parents here and peers back home) congratulate me or express shock at my abilities, they’re acting like they’re not aware of the types of people highlighted and enforcing the ideas that if you can’t speak or understand your language, you’re less than a human being and should be treated as such.
*The idea that only good parents teach their children their languages is very common in Nigeria. I understand that a language is the first point of a person’s identity, and the colonial masters used depriving people of speaking and understanding their languages as means of breaking tribal loyalties and relationships; but it also blames parents that either couldn’t teach as they didn’t know the languages themselves or didn’t think it was ‘cool’ to teach them as implicitly bad people.
**The eguns are the tribe of those originally from Lagos state - Badagry to be precise. Their language sounds like Yoruba but isn’t at all, and because of their proximity to so many Yoruba speaking people, it’s now a joke to call someone that thinks they can either speak Yoruba but really can’t or someone whose pronunciations and inflections are so off, they’re hardly speaking any Yoruba egun.
