The Atlantic slave trade carried Yoruba speech into the Americas, where it survived as a liturgical register inside the diaspora religions. In Cuba the descendants of Yoruba captives, known there as Lucumi, kept the songs, prayers and praise names of the orisha in a ritual language, also called Lucumi, which preserves large amounts of Yoruba vocabulary and song text within Santeria, the Regla de Ocha.
In Brazil the Candomble houses of the Nago and Ketu nations likewise pray and sing to the orixas in a Yoruba derived liturgical register, and terreiro communities in Bahia have maintained it for two centuries. In both cases the ritual language ceased to be a spoken vernacular and became something like church Latin, learned in initiation, sung in ceremony, and prized precisely for its fixity. Since the late twentieth century, growing contact between diaspora practitioners and Nigerian teachers has fed a movement of relearning, with priests studying standard Yoruba to deepen or correct the inherited ritual register. The traffic now runs both ways, with academies in Havana, Salvador, Lagos and the United States teaching Yoruba as a sacred language to initiates worldwide, an African liturgical language with a genuinely global congregation.