Yorùbá songs are everywhere and written down almost nowhere. What does exist online is usually untoned, half-remembered, and translated loosely if at all, which makes it close to useless for a learner, a singer, or anyone trying to understand what a line actually says. Yorùbá Lyrics exists to fix that, one song at a time.
The site holds song transcripts written in standard Yorùbá orthography, with full tone marks and subdots, each line paired with an English translation of the same line. Where a line carries a proverb, an oríkì, a piece of wordplay or a reference a listener outside the tradition would miss, contributors add a note explaining it. Where a line can honestly be read in more than one way, they add the alternative rather than overwriting someone else's work, and others vote on which reading serves the song best.
Part of a longer project
This is a continuation of the same archive and corpus work that YorubaName.com and YorubaWord.com began: documenting Yorùbá as it is actually used, in a form that is open, correctly written, and useful to both people and machines. YorubaName documents names and their meanings. YorubaWord defines the language in itself. TTSYoruba gives it a synthetic voice. IgboNames does for Igbo what YorubaName does for Yorùbá. This site takes on the songs.
The sites share a purpose. Each one turns something that lives mainly in speech and memory into a written record that can be searched, cited, taught from, and built on. Song is where a great deal of Yorùbá idiom, proverb and praise poetry actually survives, which makes a properly tone-marked, properly translated body of lyrics worth more than the sum of its pages.
Oríkì and the oral forms
Recorded songs are only part of what this site is for. Oríkì — the praise poetry attached to a family, a lineage, a town or a person — belong here too, and they are the material most at risk. A family's oríkì is typically held by a handful of elders, passed down by being chanted rather than written, and lost in a generation when it is not. The same is true of ewì, ìjálá, rárà and the ẹ̀sà chanted for egúngún.
If you know your own family's oríkì, or your town's, or one an elder chanted over you at a naming, you are welcome to add it. The form asks whose it is, where it is from, and who you learnt it from, rather than for an artist and an album. Put down whatever translation you can manage; others will help with the rest, and the praise names and epithets are exactly what the line notes are for, since an oríkì is largely a chain of compressed references that no English line can carry by itself.
An oríkì you hold is yours to share. We ask that you not post another family's without their blessing.
Who writes it
Everything here is written by people who know the songs. Anyone signed in can add a song, correct a tone mark, offer a different translation, explain a line, or say that something still needs work. Every earlier version is kept, so a mistake costs a click to undo. There is no editorial gate between a contributor and the page, because the people who know a song best are rarely the people who happen to run the website.
Who runs it
Yorùbá Lyrics is run by the Yorùbá Names Lexicography Initiative, a registered non-profit in Nigeria, and the organisation behind the sites above. It succeeds an earlier version of this project that ran at yorubalyrics.ng, and songs from that archive are being brought across.
Write to us at project@yorubaname.com — to ask about the project, to tell us about a song, to offer a collection, or, if you hold rights in a song published here, to ask us to credit it differently or take it down.