Speaker
Description
Adeniyi, O. O.
Federal College of Education (Special) Oyo
shadaolugbenroolubusola@gmail.com
Track: Inclusion, Equity and Digital Access
Abstract*
The rapid digitalization of the Sub-Sahara Africa financial landscape has
incongruously deepen a digital divide rooted in language. While English remains the default language of mobile banking apps, e-commerce platforms, and point-of-sales (POS) interfaces, themajority of actors in the informal economy of South West Nigeria rely primarily and in some cases solely on the Yoruba language. The paper draws on Bourdieu’s theory of Linguistic capital, and the techno-linguistic marginalisation framework, to investigate how localisation of digital financial interfaces in Yoruba drives economic empowerment and digitalinclusion. The study adopts a mixed-methods socio-
linguistic approach. First, it performs a structural text and corpus analysis of translation strings and automated audio prompts used by leading Nigerian Fintech platforms, such as Agentpesa and Dailybills. The paper evaluates the accuracy of diacritics, semantic shift, and the lexical adaptation into Yoruba of some complex financial terminologies, such as interest rates, transfers, and tokens. Secondly, semi structured interviews and usability observations was conducted with 60 market actors across Oyo and Ondo States. Preliminary findings indicate that proper orthographic engineering and culturally resonate tone-accurate audio prompts significantly reduce transaction anxiety, lower user error rates, and increase financial autonomy among non-English literate traders. Conversely, the frequent omission of diacritics in SMS alerts and application user interfaces creates semantic ambiguity, resulting in financial mistrust, and systematic exclusion. The paper argues that Yoruba language is not merely an instrument for cultural preservation but a vital economic asset for traders. It concludes by recommendingactionable policy frameworks for collaboration between Yoruba linguists, software developers, and regulatory bodies like NITDA, to standardize language localisation in the digital economy.