Yoruba people
ethnic group of Nigeria, Benin and Togo
The Yoruba people ( YORR-uub-ə; Yoruba: Ìran Yorùbá, Ọmọ Odùduwà, Ọmọ Káàárọ̀-oòjíire) are a West African ethnic group who inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, a region collectively called Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute more than 50 million people in Africa and over a million outside the continent, and bear further representation among the African diaspora in countries like Brazil, Cuba and The Caribbean. The vast majority of Yoruba live in Nigeria where they make up 20.7% of the country's population according to Ethnologue estimates, making them one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa. Most Yoruba people speak the Yoruba language, which is the Niger–Congo language with the largest number of native or L1 speakers.
Etymology
The oldest known textual reference to the name Yoruba is found in an essay (titled – Mi'rāj al-Ṣu'ūd) from a manuscript written by the Berber jurist Ahmed Baba in the year 1614. The original manuscript is preserved in the Ahmed Baba Institute of the Mamma Haidara Library in Timbuktu while a digital copy is at the World Digital Library. Mi'rāj al-Ṣu'ūd provides one of the earliest known ideas about the ethnic composition of the West African interior. The relevant section of the essay which lists the Yoruba group alongside nine others in the region as translated by John Hunwick and Fatima Harrak for the Institute of African Studies Rabat, reads:
We will add another rule for you, that is that whoever now comes to you from among the group called Mossi, or Gurma, or Bussa, or Borgu, or Dagomba, or Kotokoli, or Yoruba, or Tombo, or Bobo, or K.rmu – all of these are unbelievers remaining in their unbelief until now. Similarly Kumbe except for a few people of Hombori
This early 1600s reference implies that the name Yoruba was already in popular demotic use as far back as at least the 1500s. Regarding the source and derivation of this name, guesses were posited by various foreign sociologists of external sources.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Yoruba people” is ethnic group of Nigeria, Benin and Togo. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Yoruba, people and ethnic, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q190168. The Library of Congress control number is sh85149240. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1614.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yoruba people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.