Dyarim in Nigeria

Introduction / History

Speakers of the Dyarim language live in six villages in Bauchi State of Nigeria. Kayauri Dutse is the central village where festivals are held. The language area is remote with few roads. The Dyarim say that before they moved to their current location, they lived with the Geji people on Zaranda Hill.

What Are Their Lives Like?

Agriculture is the main occupation of the Dyarim people. They raise cattle and other stock and grow crops, including cotton, ground nuts, millet, tomatoes, and yams. The government has introduced advance irrigation schemes to increase production.

The Dyarim are multilingual, speaking Hausa, English, and some neighboring languages. Their levels of proficiency in these different languages varies across generations and communities. Children and the elderly do not know English well. Dyarim is the language most frequently used in the home. In town, when interacting with others, people tend to use Hausa. Three of the Dyarim villages have had schools since the 1990s. Around 93 percent of the children attend school. These schools use English and Hausa, and the textbooks are in English. Some teachers allow children to use Dyarim in school.

What Are Their Beliefs?

The number of Muslims and the number of Christians are about equal among the Dyarim. The rest practice African Traditional Religion with animism, a religious worldview that believes natural physical entities such as animals, plants, and even inanimate objects possess a spiritual essence, being its core concept.

Hausa and English are used in church. Pastors may encourage interpretation of the sermon into Dyarim for the elderly. Dyarim is also used for prayers, hymns and songs, announcements, and women’s fellowship. Arabic is used in mosques.

What Are Their Needs?

Roads need to be built to gain easier access to this remote language area.

Dyarim remains in use for face-to-face communication across generations. Dyarim people have a good attitude toward their language. They spoke with pride about their language, expecting it to be spoken for generations to come. They desire to document their language to aid in its development.

Significant proportions of the Dyarim communities follow different religions. Conducting some community activities would help determine if a unity of purpose can be achieved for language development. Interested community leaders could attend a planning workshop that would expose them to the concepts of language vitality and language development. SIL Nigeria and other partnering language development organizations can provide training and help them implement limited development projects. This would be a good opportunity to assess their long-term commitment to language development efforts.

The Dayrim need Scripture in their language to grow in their faith in Christ and lovingly share the gospel with their Muslims neighbors.

Prayer Points

Pray that community leaders from different religious backgrounds will be willing to meet to discuss whether they desire to pursue language development.
Pray Dyarim community leaders will set some short-term goals for a language development project that would include Bible translation.

Text Source:   Joshua Project