We Yorubas are known for not pronouncing words too well or making
some words sound like they have some consonant sound in them.
We pronounce every vowel with an ‘H’ sound, we take out vowels and
replace it with the letter ‘H’ and vice versa e.g ‘America’ pronounced ‘Hamerika
’, ‘eye’ pronounced ‘Heyes’ , ‘Hot’
pronounced ‘ot ’ ‘Hello’ pronounced ‘ello’
It’s an attribute we are not meant to be proud of, but we treasure it
like some prized possession and we use it a lot in spelling our names e.g ‘Olatunji’
spelt ‘horlatunjee’ ‘Oreoluwa’ spelt ‘Horeoluwah’
‘Ayo’ spelt ‘Hayor’ ‘Ibk’ spelt ‘Hibeekay’
It also happens for the letters ‘F’ and ‘V’ where both letters are interchanged,
here’s an example “My Vaith looks up to thee thou king oV calFary saFior diFine”
I think we do this because there’s no letter ‘V’ in the Yoruba
alphabets, but there’s no explanation for the H though.
The Ibadan people have carved out a niche for themselves by the way
they pronounce their words. In the Yoruba world, they are famous for pronouncing
sounds ‘Sh’ and ‘ch’ as ‘S’ e.g ‘Chicken’ proununced ‘sicken’, Up Shooting
Stars pronounced “Up sooting Stars” , Champion pronounced ‘Sampion’.
More examples abound feel free to add by commenting………….
Coming soon, hilarious pronunciation from Calabar and Ijaw people!
