ABSTRACT
the son of Yorubaland who is commonly known today as Samuel Ajayi Crowther—though his original African name appears on none of his printed works—probably first came into contact with linguistic studies by acting as an informant of the Reverend John Raban and of Mrs. Hannah Kilham in Freetown in the later 1820s. Crowther, a student at Fourah Bay Christian Institution and then a mission school-teacher, is believed to have supplied Yoruba vocabularies for Raban’s and Mrs. Kilham’s publications, and also to have attempted to acquire and study Temne, the language neighbouring the Freetown colony. 1 During the 1830s, Crowther may have begun a serious study of his mother-tongue: his selection in 1840 as a mission representative on the forthcoming Niger Expedition suggests that his interest in African linguistics was known, and his companionship on the expedition with the Reverend J. F. Schön, an experienced linguist, most probably encouraged him to prepare the grammar and vocabulary of Yoruba which was published in 1843.
