The Yorùbá alphabet (25 letters) and its tone marks

Standard Yorùbá is written with 25 letters: a b d e ẹ f g gb h i j k l m n o ọ p r s ṣ t u w y. That is 18 consonants and 7 vowels. Gb counts as one letter, and three letters carry a dot underneath: ẹ, ọ and ṣ. The English letters c, q, v, x and z are not used. The words below are the examples a beginners' course uses for each letter.

The seven oral vowels are a, e, ẹ, i, o, ọ, u. Adding n after a vowel makes it nasal: an, ẹn, in, ọn, un. An and ọn sound the same; they are only spelled differently (Ìbàdàn, ìbọn 'gun'). M and n can also stand alone as a syllable that carries its own tone, as in Mò ń lọ, 'I am going'.

Yorùbá is a tone language: the pitch of each syllable is part of the word. There are three tones. High tone is marked with an acute accent (á), low tone with a grave accent (à), and mid tone is usually left unmarked. The same letters can be three different words: bí 'to give birth', bi 'to ask', bì 'to vomit'. Written without marks, owo could be money, trade, hand or respect, so careful writing marks every tone.

A vowel can carry both marks at once: the dot below for ẹ or ọ, and an accent above for the tone, as in ọ̀bọ (monkey) or ẹ́. Unicode has single characters for ẹ (U+1EB9), ọ (U+1ECD) and ṣ (U+1E63); the tone is added with a combining acute (U+0301) or grave (U+0300). The dot always belongs to the letter, the accent to the tone, so type the dotted letter first and the tone after it. Text written this way searches, sorts and reads aloud correctly.

Most phone keyboards only offer plain vowels, which is why so much Yorùbá online is written 'E se' instead of Ẹ ṣé. A Yorùbá keyboard, such as the one in the free bhala.app keyboard, gives you ẹ, ọ and ṣ directly and lets you add a tone mark to any vowel, including a dotted one. Check the result: Ẹ kú àárọ̀ should show a dot under the first E and marks over the vowels.

On a computer, add a Yorùbá keyboard layout in your system's language settings, or install a dedicated Yorùbá keyboard such as the free one offered by YorubaName.com for Mac and Windows. If you only need a few words, you can insert the characters by their Unicode code points (ẹ U+1EB9, ọ U+1ECD, ṣ U+1E63, then U+0301 for high tone or U+0300 for low tone). Whatever method you use, keep the marks: they are part of the spelling, not decoration.