User:HeftyChap/sandbox

Use of Tone
In East Asia, tone is typically lexical, meaning that tone (instead of grammar) is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms. This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong. However, some Yue Chinese dialects have minimal grammatical use of tone.

Contrastingly, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone is crucial to the grammar, with relatively little lexical use. In the Kru languages, a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems of the type more typical of Africa, which are inflected to indicate tense and mood, person, and polarity, so that tone may be the only distinguishing feature between "you went" and "I won't go".

'''In colloquial Yoruba, especially when spoken quickly, vowels may assimilate to each other, and consonants elide so much that much of the lexical and grammatical information is carried by tone. In languages of West Africa such as Yoruba, people may even communicate with so-called "talking drums", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by whistling the tones of speech.'''

Yoruba Language
Yoruba ( Yor. Èdè Yorùbá) is a language spoken in West Africa and most prominently South western Nigeria. The number of speakers of Yoruba is estimated between 45 and 55 million, primarily by the ethnic Yoruba people. It is a pluricentric language spoken principally in Nigeria and Benin, with communities in Sierra Leone, Liberia, other parts of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. The non-vernacular remains of the language in the Caribbean, Lucumi, is the liturgical language of the Santería religion of Cuba. The Yoruba language is also used in many other Afro-American religions in the Americas and the Caribbean. Many Yoruba words are used in the Afro-Brazilian religion based in Brazil known as Candomblé and Santería religion based in Cuba. Lucumi is the liturgical language of Santería. In North America, Adefunmi founded the Shango Temple (later known as the Yoruba Temple), a blend of Catholicism and Santería. The Yoruba Religion references several terms in the Yoruba Language. Yoruba is most closely related to the Itsekiri language (spoken in the Niger Delta) and to Igala (spoken in central Nigeria).

Yoruba Language
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40653205

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/576211

https://inspireafrika.com/en/the-oyotunji-village-a-mini-yoruba-empire-in-the-usa/