The person who made the biggest contribution to Yoruba literacy was Bishop Ajayi (Samual) Crowther (1806-1891), who studied many of the languages of Nigeria, including Yoruba, and wrote and translated in some of them. The first Yoruba publications were a number of teaching booklets produced by John Raban in 1830-2. Missionaries devised ways to write Yoruba with the Latin alphabet during the 19th century. Yoruba was written with a version of the Arabic alphabet (Ajami) from the 17th century. The Northwest dialects of Ọyọ and Ibadan are the basis for Literary Yoruba or Standard Yoruba, the formal written version of Yoruba. There are five groups of Yoruba dialects: Northwest, Northeast, Central, Southwest and Southeast. Yoruba is also known as Yariba, Yooba or Yorùbá. Other countries with significant numbers of Yoruba speakers include Ghana (460,000), Togo (117,000), Côte d'Ivoire (115,000) and Niger (74,800). Yoruba is taught in some primary schools in Benin. In Benin Yoruba is spoken by about 209,000 people, especially in Porto-Novo city in the southwest. It is taught in schools, and used in newspapers, TV, radio and literature. Yoruba is spoken by about 42 million people in Nigeria, is one of the four official languages of Nigeria, along with English, Hausa and Igbo, and the de facto provincial language in the southwestern region. Status: official language in Nigeria, Benin and Togo.Writing system: Arabic and Latin alphabets.
Spoken in: Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger.Language family: Niger–Congo, Atlantic–Congo, Volta-Congo, Volta–Niger, Yoruboid, Edekiri.
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