Pleasure in language arises from the creativity of everyday life. Africa’s historical and ethnographic record is full of striking examples of linguistic play. Three scenes of Yorùbá linguistic creativity illustrate this: praise poetry in a small town, a traveling popular theater, and early Yorùbá newspapers. Each yields distinctive pleasures, but central to all of these is the act of mutual recognition of forms of words and attunement to the linguistic production of others. Barber suggests that verbal arts bring to consciousness the fundamental processes by which sociality is constituted and may thus provide a potential starting point for social theory from “within.”

语言的乐趣来自于日常生活的创造性。非洲的历史和民族志记录充满了语言游戏的显着例子。约鲁巴语言创造力的三个场景说明了这一点：在小镇赞美诗歌、巡回流行剧院和早期约鲁巴报纸。每一种都会产生独特的乐趣，但所有这些的核心是相互识别单词形式和协调他人语言生产的行为。巴伯认为，语言艺术让人们意识到社会性构成的基本过程，因此可能为“内部”的社会理论提供一个潜在的起点。