Isekiri (also Itsekiri, Shekiri) is a language spoken by about 500,000 Isekiri people in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. David Griffiths, in his Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer, classifies it as a dialect of Yoruba, one of the most widely-spoken African tongues. Other sources, including Ethnologue, have it as a separate language, although closely related to Yoruba.

The book contains only a portion of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: Morning and Evening Prayer (both with much omitted), the Litany, and the Catechism. Additionally, it has a series of questions (a Catechism) on Biblical knowledge.

Since writing in Isekiri (and Yoruba) contains a few unusual characters - e, o, and s with a dot or line underneath - the text is presented here as a series of PDF (Adobe Acrobat) graphics files, each of which total about 1 megabyte. Text on this page in Isekiri uses the Arial Unicode font, the only commonly available font which contains the required characters. If you see boxes where you expect letters, you do not have that font on your computer, and will need to obtain it in order to view all the text.

This book appears in Griffiths' Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer as 196:5, and is briefly mentioned in Muss-Arnolt's The Book of Common Prayer among the Nations of the World. This 1909 printing was the first; it was reprinted at least twice.

Iṣẹ Ṣẹkiri

Iṣẹ Owurọ   Morning Prayer
Iṣẹ Alẹ   Evening Prayer
Litany
Katikisimu Ẹgwari   Catechism
Katikisimu Watti   Catechism on the Bible

The entire book as a PDF (5 MB)