Yoruba personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My grandmother's brother speaks Yoruba on the phone every Sunday evening, and for years I heard it as pleasant noise. What changed my attitude was noticing that he sometimes repeated what sounded to me like the same word twice in one sentence, with what I eventually worked out was a different pitch each time. I found a library grammar and learned that tone in Yoruba does grammatical and lexical work, distinguishing words that an English speaker's ear flattens into one. That was the first time a language had looked to me like a system I could take apart rather than a list to memorise. Since then I have been reading about tone languages more generally, and my A-level in English Language has given me the vocabulary for what I was noticing: phonemes, minimal pairs, the difference between how speakers think they talk and what a recording shows. I want to study Yoruba at degree level partly because I want to speak it properly, with the grammar behind me rather than guessed at, and partly because I want to work on it as a linguist. I am interested in a language spoken by many millions of people across West Africa and its diaspora, with a long written and oral tradition, that still receives less attention in British classrooms than languages with far fewer speakers. Studying the literature, the proverbs and the historical texts alongside the language itself appeals to me more than a purely conversational course would. In the longer term I am drawn towards translation or language documentation, but I am aware that I need several years of serious study before I can judge that sensibly.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels give me a useful mix for this course. English Language is the closest fit: I have covered phonetics and phonology, language change and attitudes to variation, and I completed a coursework investigation into the way my college friends switch between accents depending on who they are speaking to. Doing that taught me how to transcribe carefully, how to be honest about small sample sizes, and how easily you can hear what you expect to hear rather than what was said. History has trained me to read sources with attention to who produced them and why, which I think matters for African language studies, where a good deal of the early published material was written by missionaries and colonial officials with their own purposes. My extended essay looked at the Atlantic slave trade's consequences for coastal West African states, and that reading first showed me how widely Yoruba speech and practice travelled to Brazil and Cuba. Geography has been less directly relevant but has kept me working with data and with maps of population and migration. Outside timetabled lessons I have worked steadily through a borrowed introductory grammar, writing out paradigms by hand and testing myself on the tone diacritics, and I listen to a Lagos radio station most mornings before college. I cannot yet follow fast speech, but I can pick out greetings, numbers, questions and an increasing number of verbs, and I keep a note of anything I hear repeatedly so I can look it up.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

The project I am proudest of is small and homemade. At the community centre where I volunteer on Saturdays, setting out chairs and helping with the tea urn, three of the regulars are Yoruba speakers from different parts of Nigeria. With their permission I began writing down twenty everyday phrases and noting how each person said them, using my phone to record short clips so I could listen again. I found differences I had not expected, particularly in vowels and in the words chosen for ordinary things like money and food, and one speaker explained that a phrase I had written down was more formal than I realised and would sound odd from someone my age. I now have a notebook of about two hundred entries with my own rough transcriptions and their corrections. It is not research, but it has taught me to ask better questions and to accept being corrected without embarrassment. Volunteering there has also improved my patience and my ability to talk with people forty years older than me. My part-time job at a garden centre involves serving customers, stock checks and a lot of lifting on delivery days; it has made me reliable with early starts and careful with money, since I am saving towards study costs. I play five-a-side football on Thursdays, which is where most of my Yoruba slang has come from. I am used to organising my own time around work and college, and I am ready for the daily effort that learning a tonal language properly will need.

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