yoruba's lost c

A B D E Ẹ F G GB H I J K L M N O Ọ P R S Ṣ T U W Y

These are the latin based letters used to form the written Yoruba language. The keen eyed of you will notice that there are some additional letters present: Ẹ, GB, Ọ and Ṣ. There are also 5 that are missing: c, q, v, x and z.

As a Yoruba person that grew up in the UK, from a young age I was aware of the fact that our language didn’t have the letter ‘C’, but never really questioned why. That was until the thought kept me up last night.

From what I understand of Yoruba history, the adoption of the written language came as a result of Christian missionaries in the 19th Century. Prior to that, Yoruba was an oral tradition. Consequently, the way the language was codified was by mapping the sounds of words to the phonetic sounds of Latin letters.

In English, the letter C is, for the most part, phonetically equivalent to ‘S’ and ‘K’. The only case that stands out to me of when a C couldn’t be replaced with either is when creating a ‘Ch’ sound; however, this phonetic sound isn’t needed in Yoruba. Conversely, the ‘Sh’ sound was so prominent it was given its own letter: Ṣ.

The story is similar for the other missing letters. Traditional Yoruba doesn’t make use of the phonetic sounds of q, v, x, or z. This is why it’s typical to see Yoruba people pronounce ‘z’ as ‘s’, ‘v’ as ‘f’, ‘q’ as ‘k’ and sometimes ‘x’ as ‘g’.