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Comparative Notes on Yoruba and Lucumí
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
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Lucumí is a term here used to refer to a language spoken in Cuba by practitioners of the religion known as Santería. In Cuba both the santeros and the language are often called Lucumí, a form of which the origin has been discussed by William Bascom. Bascom seems to have been the first to assert positively that Lucumí is derived from Yoruba, a language of southwestern Nigeria. This view is supported by the folklore of Lucumí-speakers, which often contains propositions like these: Lucumí is Yoruba; Lucumí and Yoruba are the same thing; Lucumí is a dialect of Yoruba; Lucumí is a mixture of Yoruba dialects. Other writers have rejected the classification of Lucumí as related to Yoruba in the usual sense, and have called Lucumí a pidgin language. The purpose of this paper is to test Bascom's hypothesis by the comparative method—specifically, by investigating phoneme correspondences in cognate items.
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- Copyright © 1953 Linguistic Society of America
References
1 For acknowledgments see Olmsted, Covert (or zero) morphemes and morphemic juncture, IJAL 17.163 fn. 1; id., The phonemes of Yoruba, Word 7.245 fn. 1. William R. Bascom encouraged and assisted my field study of Lucumí; funds to support my trip were made available by Mark A. May, administrator of the Ford Foundation grant for research in behavior science to the Institute of Human Relations of Yale University. I am grateful also for the invaluable help of Oswaldo Morales-Patino, President of the National Archeological Commission of Cuba, of Bernardo Solis, and of Rafael Cepero, and for the cooperation of my nine Lucumí informants, who are unnamed here at their own request. An earlier draft of this paper was read before the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Cambridge, December 1952.
2 Cf. William R. Bascom, The focus of Cuban Santería, Southwestern journal of anthropology 6.64-8 (1950) ; id., Two forms of Afro-cuban divination, Acculturation in the Americas 2.169-79 (Proceedings of the 29th International Congress of Americanists ; Chicago, 1952); Fernando Ortiz, Hampa afro-cubana: Los negros esclavos (La Habana 1916); id., Los negros brujos (Madrid, 1917); Melville J. Herskovits, African gods and Catholic saints in New World Negro belief, American anthropologist 39.635-43 (1937); id., The myth of the Negro past 220 ff. (New York, 1941) ; Rómulo Lachatañere, Manual de Santería (Estudios afrocubanos; La Habana, 1942); Arthur Ramos, Las culturas negras en el Nuevo Mundo 111-39 (Mexico City, 1943) ; Nicolas Angarica, El ‘Lucumí‘ al Alcance de Todos (La Habana, n.d.); Israel Castellanos, La brujería y el Ñañiguismo en Cuba (La Habana, 1916).
3 Bascom, The Yoruba in Cuba, Nigeria 37.14-20.
4 Ibid. 17.
5 Cf. Ortiz, Glosario de afronegrismos (La Habana 1924); Ramos, Culturas negras 137. My findings do not accord with the view, attributed to Castellanos and Ortiz by Ramos (Culturas negras 117 fn. 8), that the term Carabalí is to be connected with Lucumí or any pidgin language partially derived therefrom. An excellent Carabali informant, who also called his language Brícamu and Efí, supplied me with extensive texts. The language is certainly not Lucumí; it may be related to Efik as Lucumí is to Yoruba.
6 Cf. Henry M. Hoenigswald, The principal step in comparative grammar, Lg. 26.357-64 (1950).
7 [j] and [č] are affricates; [gb] and [kp] are labiovelar stops.
8 In view of my promise to the informants not to reveal details of their religion, the Spanish names of Catholic saints corresponding to Lucumi deities are suppressed here. Interested readers can find most of them in the works referred to in fn. 2, particularly Herskovits, African gods.
9 These two forms were offered by different informants. I have tried to use only forms common to all informants. Failing that, I have thought it desirable to use pairs of terms, each of which occurred in the idiolect of a single informant. Sometimes not even this was possible.
10 Compare the treatment for Yoruba in Olmsted, Phonemes 248-9.
11 Op.cit. 247.
12 Since the publication of my article on the phonemes of Yoruba, I have found a few forms with what seem to be consonant clusters in Samuel Crowther, Vocabulary of the Yoruba language (London, 1852) : efangẹlisti ‘evangelist’, alkurani ‘the Koran’, bans ‘marriage bans’, siksik ‘hiccough’. I have not been able to try these out on any informant.
13 The blank spaces in the table are accounted for by the following considerations. Y /š/ = L /č/; Y /h/ and /·/ both = zero (L /·/ does not occur in forms with Yoruba cognates) ; Y /ỹ/ (two phonemes) = L /ñ/ (a unit phoneme).
14 Gathered during a field trip to Cuba during June and July, 1952. All informants were from the Habana-Jovellanos-Matanzas area in western Cuba.
15 The reliability of informants was estimated by checking the internal consistency of their texts, by investigating their language-learning history, and by getting informal ratings of their proficiency in the language from other speakers. This was necessary since the language is learned in adolescence or later, so that age alone is here no guarantee of proficiency.
16 In marked contrast to the statement which I made in a paper read before the 1952 summer meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Bloomington. On that occasion, full of zeal after my return from Cuba, I announced that ‘there is a surprisingly high percentage of lexical correspondence between Lucumi and Yoruba. ... at a rough guess, about 90%.‘
17 There is also a form /kûkuá/. Some informants have L [kṷ] corresponding to Y /kp/, with [ṷ] lost before [u] but retained elsewhere.
18 Cf. example 10 in the list above, and cf. also /ogũ/ name of a deity : /ogũ/ the god of iron.
19 The form showing analogical change is L /mέje/ ‘seven’, corresponding to Y /e5je2/. Contiguous Lucumí numerals are /mέta/ ‘three’, /mέrĩ/ ‘four’, /mánũ/ ‘five’, /mέfa/‘six’, /mέjo/ ‘eight’, /mέsa/ ‘nine’, /mέua/ ‘ten’.
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