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Paper short abstract:

By engaging speech surrogacy system as a formal sociolinguistic tool, this study aims to promote Yorùbá drum language, by exploring how the talking drums, a traditional didactic and activity tool, can be integrated in classrooms to achieve same pedagogical and cultural benefits in a modern context.

Paper long abstract:

The Yorùbá people are known for their exuberant cultural heritage, passed down orally through generations. Until the incursion of ‘colonial’ language and education system based on Western epistemology, Yorùbá societies had their independent knowledge systems. These traditional systems successfully functioned as the authentic instructive model of communication and knowledge production. Amongst these is the Yorùbá drum language, a surrogate language achieved on the talking drums through the imitation of the language’s tonal inflections. Traditionally, the drummers employ oral genres as sources of the drum’s surrogate language, in conjunction with socio-cultural contexts in the drum lexicon formation and communication. By engaging the speech surrogacy system as a formal sociolinguistic tool, this research aims at promoting the Yorùbá drum language as not just archival resources, but also exploring how the talking drums, traditionally employed in Yorùbá societies as a communal didactic tool and cultural knowledge activities, can be incorporated in classrooms to achieve similar pedagogical and cultural benefits in a modern context. Data was elicited through observations, interviews, questionnaires and bibliographic sources. The findings reveal that the talking drums and drum language enhance Yorùbá language learning in classrooms, also indigenous languages can be incorporated in teaching modes in formal education. The research recommends that such drive in disentangling the drum language from the entrapment and stagnancy effect of the current colonial language pedagogy, engenders African indigenous language development and preservation, towards the future of African languages, cultural heritage and critical discourse on African scholarship and epistemologies.