Title:                                       Empowering the Yorùbá Language: The Media’s Efforts

 

Authors name:                    Luqman Ayọ̀délé Yusuff

 

Institutional Affiliation:      University of Lagos

 

Address:                               Dept. of Linguistics, African & Asian Studies,

                                                Room A509, Arts Block, University of Lagos,

                                                Akoka-Lagos, Nigeria.

 

Telephone:                          08037118691

 

e-mail address:                   yoyussuf@yahoo.co.uk

 

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the lexical items that are enriching the Yorùbá language through the media in its continuous attempt to capture emerging ideas and notions, consequent upon challenges posed by advancement in areas of education, science, technology, politics and public administrations in the modern times. Efforts toward the empowerment of the Yorùbá language are not limited to the media. Scholars have been responding purposefully and deliberately, and results of such efforts have been published, but their fields of discourse are limited by whatever purpose the terms are meant to serve. Apart from Bamgbose (1992) which focuses on strategies employed in generating terms by newscasters in a case study, there is no in-depth study of media’s efforts toward empowering the Yorùbá language. The media is observed to be a formidable source of language empowerment. This is so because it is saddled with the responsibility of giving expression in the Yorùbá language to modern concepts which are outside the experience of the monolingual, non-literate and mostly rural speaker of the language. The media’s field of discourse is unlimited. From the uncoordinated nature of their generated terms, one can say that the media do not come together to harmonize their terms so that they can be uniform. However, one cannot but be impressed by the extent to which the media has enriched the lexicon of the Yorùbá language through the formulation of terms for modern concepts intuitively and spontaneously. This study observes areas of inappropriateness and disharmony in the terms generated by the media. It therefore attempts a categorization of the terms, illustrates areas of inappropriateness among the generated terms and attempts a reconciliation of the apparent disharmony by arguing on the platforms of appropriateness and effectiveness. It concludes by making recommendations to the media for the achievement of preciseness, appropriateness and effectiveness of their generated terms.