Professor O.A Ajala of the Geography department at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife has delivered a presentation of the linguistic atlas of Osun and Ogun state at the recently held workshop for demographers and cartographers in Abidjan, Cote d'voire.

According to him, Osun state predominantly speak Yoruba language. Yoruba language falls under the cross border language categorization as it is the major language of the Yoruba people found in the south western region of Nigeria. His presentation further revealed that there are five(5) language variations or dialect of Yoruba language spoken in Osun states, which are Oyo, Osun, Ijesha, Igbomina and a mixture of Oyo, Ife and Ijesha dialects.

It further reveals that the language distribution shows that Oyo is the predominantly spoken language accounting for 43.4% of the total population in the state, followed by Osun with 21.4%, Ijesa 18.1%, a mixture of Ife/Oyo/Ijesa 14.2% and Igbomina accounting for 2.9%.

Furthermore, Prof. Ajala in his presentation submitted that Yoruba language is the dominant language spoken in Ogun state with four variations or dialect of Yoruba language spoken across the state. The dialect or language variations spoken by the Ogun indigenes are Egba, Ijebu, Awori and Yewa.

In Ogun state 37 per cent of the people speak Egba language followed closely by Ijebu language which accounts for 33.4 per cent, 15.6 per cent speak Yewa language while 14 per cent of the totalpopulation speak Awori language.

The workshop was organised by the African Academy of languages, ACALAN. The Academy is currently working on producing a linguistic atlas of Africa.

ACALAN is the linguistic arm of the African Union, burdened with the task of fostering Africa's integration and development through the development, preservation and promotion of the use of African languages.