About Speak Nigeria

Speak Nigeria is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, registered as SpeakNigeria Inc, EIN 99-2964468. We help children learn and keep Nigerian languages, and we build the free digital resources they learn from. This dictionary is one of them.

Why we exist

A language can slip away in a single generation. It happens in the diaspora, but it also happens across urban Nigeria, where English-dominant classrooms, internal migration, and rapid cultural shifts leave children disconnected from the languages of their homes.

The loss usually happens quietly: children understand more than they speak, then speak less than they understand, until the language becomes something only their grandparents spoke.

A language is never just vocabulary. It carries family memory, cultural identity, and belonging. When a child keeps their language, they keep all of it.

Yet parents and educators trying to pass these languages on face an immediate hurdle: for most Nigerian languages, modern, child-friendly digital resources simply do not exist. Where tools do exist, they are rarely built for the way children naturally learn.

Built for the language, not adapted to it

A child learning Spanish has thousands of apps, games and dictionaries built around how Spanish works. A child learning Yorùbá is met with silence, or with software built for European languages and Yorùbá poured into it. Tone marks survive as decoration. Words built from other words are listed as separate vocabulary to memorise — the easiest thing for a computer and the hardest for a child.

Two things carry meaning in Yorùbá that most software throws away, and both are what our resources are built on.

Words are made of words. ilé ayé means Earth. It is ilé (home) and ayé (life). A learner who knows those two words can read the third without being taught it, and that is true of a great deal of the language. This dictionary shows those parts on every entry, in both directions. Language of connections is the longer account, written for teachers and learners alike.

Tone is part of the word. It is not an accent added to a spelling: change the tone and you have a different word. Our resources treat it that way from the first lesson.

We are starting with Yorùbá, where our curriculum is deepest. Igbo is next, with Hausa, Edo (Bini), Ijaw and Efik to follow.

What we make

This dictionary, free, built on open data that belongs to everybody.
Language games on our website, free and open source.
A larger open-source game for learning several Nigerian languages, in development.
A contribution platform, where volunteers add translations, spellings and pronunciations across Nigerian languages.
Live courses, taught by native speakers. These are the one thing we charge for, and they are on speaknigeria.org rather than here.

How this is funded

This dictionary is free and non-commercial. It carries no advertising, sells nothing, and collects nothing about you — after your first visit the whole dictionary is on your device and your searches never leave it.

To sustain the work, our parent nonprofit charges tuition for small-group live classes, hosted on speaknigeria.org rather than here. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, that tuition is used for:

Teacher compensation. Paying native-speaking educators for instructional time.
Public reinvestment. Hosting, maintaining and developing the free resources listed above.

Our tax-exempt status and annual Form 990-N filings are public under EIN 99-2964468 in the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search.

Contribute

The words here come from Wiktionary, which anyone can edit. A correction made there reaches this dictionary at the next refresh, and everything else in the world built on Yorùbá Wiktionary at the same time. Contribute lists the gaps we have found and the edit each one needs.

Search the dictionary Contribute an entry Visit Speak Nigeria ↗

Questions, ideas or feedback: hello@speaknigeria.org.