ktravula – a travelogue!

How are Yoruba speakers using Twitter?

KT: Same as everyone else. Code switching with English or whatever language soothes their need at the moment. This is fine. I think it’s important to mention that our intention at the start of the Tweet Yoruba project was not to turn every Yoruba speaker on twitter to monolingual Yoruba tweeters. No, it was to encourage use and improve the current attitude to indigenous language use anywhere. Yoruba just happens to be the language I’m most familiar with. I am interested in (and always encouraged by) indigenous language use anywhere/everywhere, even along with other international languages, until the attitude that one of them is inferior on the basis of the number of speakers is discredited.

Excerpt from my interview with (Egbunike Nwachukwu 0f) Global Voices. Read it here.

How are Yoruba speakers using Twitter? was published on October 3rd, 2013, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Tweet Yoruba Day 2013

On March 1, 2013, twitter users who speak Yoruba will tweet all day in their mother tongue.

This practice began last year as a means to pressure Twitter to include Yoruba in the list of languages into which the platform is being translated. There was a partial success in form of a response by a twitter translation desk official who assured that while the message has been heard, it would take a little while more to include the language, for logistic reasons.

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We have had a second contact with Twitter official @lenazun, this time to help with the question about what accepted dialect of Yoruba is generally used in official Yoruba writings and translation. (The answer is the North-West, Oyo Dialect of Yoruba). Besides that, nothing else.

The Tweet Yoruba Day on March 1, 2013* is to continue the annual tradition, but with less emphasis on pressuring Twitter but on celebrating the beauty and importance of the mother tongue usage in the age of modernity. It might never happen anytime soon that the only means of communication online would be any of these local languages with a limited number of speakers (Yoruba has over 30 million), but as long as these means of communication exist, there would always be new ways of transmitting culture and a distinct worldview.

The hashtags to use, like last year, would be #tweetYoruba and #twitterYoruba. For those still interested in reminding twitter of our intention to have the platform translated into Yoruba, copy your tweets to @twitter and @translator.

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*February 21 is The International Mother Tongue Day

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Here is the official poster. Feel free to share on your social networks:

TweetYorub2013 (1)

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speakafrica

 

Tweeters with the most creative tweets during the event will receive “I Can Speak Yoruba” T-shirts and tote bags courtesy of @SpeakAfricaApps, a supporter of the event, and Recharge Cards courtesy of Think Oyo (@ThinkOyo), another supporter. The project is brought to you with help from Molara Wood, writer (@MolaraWood), Alakowe Yoruba (@AlakoweYoruba), The Yoruba Cultural Insittute (@yorubaculture), and Kevin “Kayode” Barry (@KayodeOyinbo).

 

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Kàá ní Yorùbá

Tweet Yoruba Day 2013 was published on February 21st, 2013, with the tags , , under the Linguistics category. There are currently 15 comments on this article so far.

Re: Translating Twitter

I have been told that a backlog of more popularly requested languages will make it harder to get Yoruba to the top of the line in the Twitter Translation Lab as fast as I’d earlier thought.

Anyone still interested in translating the social media platform should make requests directly to the Translation Lab here: http://t.co/DL7VvVrM.

Re: Translating Twitter was published on January 18th, 2013, with the tags , , under the Fun, Linguistics, technology category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Twitter in Yoruba…

is not here yet, but it will be soon enough if any thing in this good news in collaborative translation is anything to go by. Click on the link to go to the translation centre and request for Yoruba as one of the new desirable languages. Right now they only have French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Later we’ll worry about who wants to use it.

Twitter in Yoruba… was published on February 15th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Literature, Travelling category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Twurai Undercover

There is much to cope with when you are the wife of a sick and/or dying president. There is even more to cope with if said husband has now been evicted from a better working hospital in Saudi Arabia and is now back in the government house, causing commotion and/or being some sort of nuisance to the rule of law that has vested political authority albeit in acting capacity in the Vice-President for the time being. As a woman in the unenviable position of balancing loyalty to a dying man, taking care of said man and his political capital, and keeping sane within a barrage of flak from the citizenry, there must be much to cope with. If we could step back a little from personal disagreement with her personality (which we don’t know much about, except hearsay) and what the government represents, could we perhaps find in Turai Yar’adua a woman of substance who’s just being a loyal wife to a dying husband? I wondered.

Read up the full text of my guest-post on Nigerianstalk.org. It was enlightening even for me.

Twurai Undercover was published on February 25th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Fun, Observations, Opinion category. There are currently 11 comments on this article so far.