Yoruba Girl Names
Names of destiny, gratitude and joy from West Africa.
Yoruba naming operates on a principle that most European traditions abandoned centuries ago, if they ever had it: the name is a statement about the circumstances of the birth.
A Yoruba name is frequently a full sentence. Abeni means we prayed for her and got her. Others state that the child was born after a long wait, or during a festival, or into a family that had suffered a loss, or that wealth has come home. The name is a piece of family history compressed into a word, and it is chosen for this child rather than selected from a stock.
There is also a formal category of names given for the manner of birth, which are fixed rather than composed: Taiwo and Kehinde for twins, in that order, with Idowu for the child born after twins. These are not optional and do not vary by family.
Layered on top is a set of names referring to the orisha — Yoruba deities — which continue in use among Yoruba Christians and Muslims as well, since the naming convention long predates either.
Tone matters. Yoruba is a tonal language and the diacritics are not decoration; the same letters with different tones are different words. English-language sources routinely drop them, which is a real loss of information, and this library keeps them where it holds them.