What native language rules Afrobeats? Yoruba, Pidgin, Twi, or Igbo?

So the astute music writers at Billboard have compiled their list of 50 Best Afrobeats Songs of All Time and we have to say it's a solid list. Well done team 👏🏾. But we were wondering if there was any proof in the widely-held belief (meaning the Tribal Tongue team and our friends Olu and Abimbola) that without Yoruba there are no Afrobeats. 

So we set out on a scientific evaluation of the Billboard list to find out. The premise: which native language appears the most in the Best 50 Afrobeats Songs of All Time? To take on such a mighty task, we needed a scientist that is versed in the languages of Nigeria and Ghana where the songs are coming from. A scientist that knows their “wahala” (problem in Pidgin) from their “shayo” (Yoruba slang for alcohol), their “odogwu” (champion in Igbo) from their “ɔdɔ yewu” (love you to death in Twi). So we turned to ChatGPT.

We gave our ChatGPT scientist the full lyrics for each song in the Best 50 list. The lyrics were pulled from sites such as Genius and Musixmatch, so if they’re wrong, we’re wrong. We asked our AI scientist to analyse the lyrics for each song and assess which languages were most frequently used across all the tracks.

And the result: 

1. English: 13 321 words (≈69.07 %)
2. Nigerian Pidgin: 3 640 words (≈18.87 %)
3. Yoruba: 1 375 words (≈7.13 %)
4. Twi: 526 words (≈2.73%)
5. Igbo: 247 words (≈1.28 %)
6. Other: 177 words (≈0.92 %)

In fact, without Pidgin there are no Afrobeats. As mentioned, we’re ignoring the King Charles English dominance as we’re focused on the native languages. We have to say, we expected Yoruba to have a greater percentage but looking at the lyrics sheet, the other native languages like Yoruba, Twi and Igbo are mostly used by dropping a word or two into an English or Pidgin sentence rather than as full sentences themselves. Unless your Sarkodie of course 💪🏿!

So we stand corrected, but take heart in the fact that the native languages together account for about 30% of the total. If you want your kids not to be in the dark when these songs come on, or miss out on future bangers then you need to shop the Tribal Tongue Talking Flashcards. Available in Yoruba, Twi and Igbo. 

That was the word from our sponsors, now for the disclaimer: we cannot double check our AI scientist’s work because ain’t no one got time for that. So please take the values as approximations.

As all good scientists do, we are providing the methodology, workings and lyric sheets below. So if you want to disprove our findings, feel free.

Methodology from our AI scientist:

The full PDF contained the lyrics for all fifty songs, so I extracted the text using a PDF‑to‑text utility and wrote a script to parse the songs.  Each song begins with a numbered line (e.g., “1. 2Baba, ‘African Queen’”) followed by its lyrics, so I split the document on these markers and saved the song title, artist and lyrics.  I then tokenized every song to identify individual words.

To classify each word by language I built simple heuristics:

• Yoruba words were recognised either by diacritics ( ẹ, ọ, ṣ, ń etc.) or by a list of common Yoruba words and particles such as “ojuelegba,” “adura,” “owo,” “aiye” and pronouns like “ni,” “wa,” “mi,” etc.  Yoruba lines in “Ojuelegba” include phrases like “Ni ojuelegba … Aiye o le to yen o … Adura lo le se o”.
  
• Igbo words were flagged if they contained Igbo diacritics (ị, ụ) or came from a list of common Igbo terms such as “nwa,” “ife,” “ukwu,” etc.  For example, Flavour’s “Nwa Baby (Ashawo Remix)” contains Igbo phrases like “Nwa baby, nye me ife gi … Ara dara ada”.
  
• Twi words were detected by open‑vowel characters (ɛ, ɔ) and common Twi terms.  Sarkodie’s “Adonai” includes many Twi lines: “Akyirehɔfoɔ no mo nyɛ no baako ma me wae” and “Ahopopoɔ a ɔmo ya nyinaa wo ho ntia”.
  
• Pidgin terms were detected via a dictionary of typical Nigerian Pidgin words (“dey,” “na,” “no,” “go,” “abeg,” “wahala,” etc.) and phrases in the lyrics. Wizkid’s “Ojuelegba” uses Pidgin lines like “My people dey there … Dem dey pray for blessing”.
  
• All grammatically complete phrases were assigned English by default.
• Any words not fitting the above categories were counted as “Other”.

Full lyrics sheet: 

Click to download 

Language breakdown table: