The Linguistic Expression of Emotion in Yoruba: A Study of Emotional Vocabulary in Lagos

This study investigates the linguistic expression of emotion in Yoruba as documented among speakers in Lagos, South West Nigeria, focusing on the structure, breadth, and social deployment of Yoruba emotional vocabulary in urban communication contexts. The linguistics of emotion has grown considerably as a field, but cross-linguistic studies of African languages remain limited, and Yoruba emotional expression has not been systematically mapped in recent scholarship. The study adopts a descriptive semantics methodology grounded in the framework of the Lexical Approach to emotions and Wierzbicka's natural semantic metalanguage. Data were collected from 80 adult Yoruba speakers in Lagos Island and Surulere through structured elicitation tasks, semantic categorisation exercises, and open-ended conversational interviews. The analysis identifies primary emotion terms, secondary or derived emotion vocabulary, and idiomatic emotional expressions, mapping their semantic fields and contextual restrictions. Findings reveal a richly differentiated Yoruba emotional lexicon with fine-grained distinctions in categories such as shame, pride, and longing that lack direct English equivalents. The study also documents the tendency among younger Lagos Yoruba speakers to adopt English emotional vocabulary when speaking Yoruba, particularly in the domains of romantic and professional emotion. The research contributes to cross-linguistic emotion studies and recommends the development of a Yoruba emotional vocabulary database for educational and cultural preservation purposes. Keywords: emotional vocabulary, Yoruba, semantic analysis, Lagos, cross-linguistic emotion.