LE 06: The Yoruba Koine - its History and Linguistic Innovations

The Yoruba Koine - its History and Linguistic Innovations

J. Gbenga Fagborun


The Yoruba Koine, extracted from the authors' doctoral dissertation, examines the history and mechanisms of linguistic innovation in the Yoruba language. The monograph is arranged into two main parts. Part One: a Linguistic History of the Yoruba Koine applies part of Romaine's panchronic model - a framework that brings together both synchronic and diachronic data to explain some sociohistorical linguistic issues. Part Two: The Mechanism of Linguistic Innovation is based on the general concept of bilingualism and of generative syntax.

The book argues that some linguistic innovations have long existed in Yoruba; a historical approach is used to determine how well established they are from the earliest period of the Yoruba written tradition to the present day. It is then suggested that to update Yoruba syntactic data and make them much more natural, innovated structures and their monolingual alternants should be standardised. The Yoruba Koine also assumes that the use of English loantranslations is not erroneous, and that those who use them have got communicative competence and creative or generative capacity in the language. It is, also, the business of this monograph to prove that the process of linguistic innovation is observable and describable.

The chief contributions this study makes to knowledge include: (a) the documentation of historical syntax of Yoruba which seems to be long overdue; (b) the standardisation of bilingual and monolingual structures - which have coexisted in the same speech community for about 15 decades; and (c) the analysis of the mechanism of loantranslation.

ISBN 9783929075472. Linguistics Edition 06. 1995.