SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Since the first experiment in 1859 with Ìwé ròyìn fún Àwọn ará gbá àti Yorùbá, Yorùbá newspapers and the broadcast media – Nigeria Broadcast Corporation and Western Nigerian Television, both established in 1957 and 1959 respectively – have positively shaped culture, influenced politics, boosted businesses and affected the lives of the Yorùbá. In spite of these achievements, studies in the mass media in Africa, particularly Nigeria, the most populous black nation, have focused on those using the English language as a medium, whereas the most immediate and close to life example of media consumption is the local media that provide news, events and values to their particular communities through indigenous languages. Therefore, the presence of Yorùbá language media on any digital platform is almost non-existent, save for Aláròyé newspaper, which has struggled over the years to maintain its online presence – in abridged form – in order to circumvent distribution expenses and ultimately bypass traditional vendors by placing work online directly, thus enabling the newspaper to reach specific audiences that could not be reached by vendors. This study argues that, although Yorùbá broadcast media have taken advantage of the dissemination avenues offered by digital technologies as many of them are now available on a few social media and digital platforms, there exists a common problem to both the print and electronic media, which is the use of varied and sometimes inappropriate terms in Yorùbá to present news and reports. Thus, this work looks at these issues with a view to exposing some of these terms and suggesting solutions geared towards reconciling the varied terms and arguing for the appropriateness of suggested alternatives.