The language of the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, West Africa is a very beautiful language for having accent marks that determine or show how a word should be correctly pronounced. For a person who knows how to correctly pronounce the letters, sounds, and words in the Yorùbá language, such a person will need one more skill: the ability to read accent marks as this helps to know the correct pronunciations of words.

One reason why the accent marks are crucial is because in the Yorùbá language one word can have more than three different pronunciations and without the accent marks to different them, reading and comprehension become really difficult. The word "iya" has more than one pronunciation. One pronunciation with its correct accent mark is "ìyá"(this version of the word means "mother". Another version of the same word, with its correct accent marks, which means "suffering" is "ìyà".

These accent marks make the Yorùbá language easy to read just as it makes it beautiful.

Now my question is: do the other Nigerian languages have a similar thing?

The language of the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, West Africa is a very beautiful language for having accent marks that determine or show how a word should be correctly pronounced. For a person who knows how to correctly pronounce the letters, sounds, and words in the Yorùbá language, such a person will need one more skill: the ability to read accent marks as this helps to know the correct pronunciations of words.

One reason why the accent marks are crucial is because in the Yorùbá language one word can have more than three different pronunciations and without the accent marks to different them, reading and comprehension become really difficult. The word "iya" has more than one pronunciation. One pronunciation with its correct accent mark is "ìyá"(this version of the word means "mother". Another version of the same word, with its correct accent marks, which means "suffering" is "ìyà".

These accent marks make the Yorùbá language easy to read just as it makes it beautiful.

Now my question is: do the other Nigerian languages have a similar thing?

Hi,

I'm not sure if other Nigerian languages have similar rules or not as I've only really studied Yoruba, but I completely agree that writing accent marks, as well as writing the correct special characters such as the "eh", "aw", or "shi" characters is, as you said, crucial for learning, reading, and writing it. I get so angry when people do not write the language correctly!