An overview of the British Library Yorùbá language collection

Abstract

AbstractThe Yorùbá language materials at the British Library (BL) span the years between 1843, when the first item was published, and the present day, providing an impressive catalogue of the history of Yorùbá writing through the early days of 19th-century missionary writings with a yet undeveloped orthography, the boom of anthropological literature of the later 19th century, the creative fervour of the early and mid-20th century, and the later experimentations of 21st-century monolingual and bilingual writings. From September 2019 to September 2020, I was Chevening Research Fellow at the BL working on this wide-ranging collection with the BL’s Africa Curator. In this article, I present an analysis of what the records contain and what is missing, along with a record of some challenges I faced cataloguing the work – ranging from technological limitations to issues of orthography.