Yoruba is spoken in Nigeria, Benin and elsewhere.
Yoruba is written in the Roman alphabet but includes dotted vowels, and so requires special font keyboard support separate from languages like Spanish and French.
The following fonts include characters for dotted letters found in Yoruba spelling.
One option is to use Global Writer and switch to the IPA keyboard which includes all the correct accents. See instructions below for details.
As of Spring 2005, the international word processor Global Writer is available in the Student Computing Labs. This allows users to easily switch keyboards, including phonetic keyboards which mimic a QWERTY keyboard.
CLC Student Computing Labs: To open Global Writer, go to the Start » Internatinal Language Support » Unitype Global Writer.
Global Writer is available from Unitype for personal purchace.
A freeware keyboard utility for Yoruba is available from Open Road. Read installation instructions for details.
Yoruba support has also been expanded in Windows Vista.
For best results with combined accents, it is suggested you download and install the freeware SIL Phonetic keyboard from SIL.org.
CLC Student Computing Labs: The SIL Phonetics keyboard is available in the CLC Student Computing labs. Just go to step #5 in the instructions below.
Here are the instructions for the IPA-SIL phonetics keyboard. This is a freeware package from SIL.org (although this is called an "alpha" version, it has been available for several years).
Once you switch to the SIL Phonetic keyboard then use the following codes:
| ACCENT | SAMPLE | TEMPLATE |
|---|---|---|
| Dot Below | ọ,Ọ | V,Option+8 |
| Acute Above | ó, Ó | V,Shift+2 |
| Both Accents | ọ́,Ọ́ | V,Option+8,Shift+2, |
For instance, to type ọ́ you would type the letter O, then Option+8 for the dot, then Shift+2 for the acute accent.
For print work, there are also a number of freeware and shareware phonetics and classics fonts. You can check the Summer Institute for Linguistics Fonts in Cyberspace for more details.
For the Web, you can use the Unicode numeric codes listed below.
For dotted consonants, the following browsers have the most consistent results.
Internet Explorer for Windows may not display implosive consonants by default. Users who prefer Internet Explorer for Windows should set the Latin font to Arial Unicode MS or some other Unicode script with phonetic symbol support.
Internet Explorer for Macintosh does not support implosive consonant symbols.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.
The tables for the Yoruba accents are divided into codes for grave and acute tone marks for plain vowels and codes dotted vowels and dotted s.
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type Yorùbá you would type Yórùba.
| Accent | A | E | I | O | U |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grave &Vgrave; (Cap) |
À À |
È È |
Ì Ì |
Ò Ò |
Ù Ù |
| Grave (Lower) | à à |
è è |
ì ì |
ò ò |
ù ù |
| Acute &Vacute; (Cap) |
Á Á |
É É |
Í Í |
Ó Ó |
Ú Ú |
| Acute (Lower) | á á |
é é |
í í |
ó ó |
ú ú |
Below are the codes for dotted letters including dotted vowels with tone marks. Note that dotted vowels with accents requires two codes - the one for the dotted vowels and one for a combining accent mark. For instance, if you wanted to type ọ̀rọ̀ you would type ọ̀rọ̀.
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Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
