People watch Yoruba movies more than English –Jaiye Kuti

Oogbodo (left) with Kuti

A-list actress, Jaiye Kuti, has claimed that people watch Yoruba Nollywood movies more than its English counterpart.

She made the assertion while reacting to the issue of the increased use of the English language in Yoruba movies, a situation some people find both disturbing and disgusting as they expect that Yoruba movies should have strictly Yoruba dialogue as a way of promoting both the language and the Yoruba culture.

In her reaction, she admitted that it’s a deliberate strategy, saying, “Well, if you look at it these days, even our children, when you speak Yoruba to them, sometimes they don’t even understand your Yoruba very much. And then, because report has come to us that we should try and just mix it with English so that people who don’t speak Yoruba would also understand.

“But take it or leave it, people that watch Yoruba movies are more, you know, and when we mix it up, we just want them to understand what we do most of the time. There are movies that we cannot mix English at all, and there are some that it doesn’t matter if we have to mix even Igbo, Hausa with them. So we have the mixed and we have the pure Yoruba speaking movies. So it depends. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing. We just want people to understand us.”

The Nigerian movie industry is basically divided into four language sections: English, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa. But with Nigeria having many more languages than just these four, Nigerian productions tend to sometimes feature more than these four languages in even a single production.