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| Dagbani Dagbane |
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|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Ghana | |
| Total speakers: | ~800,000 | |
| Language family: | Niger-Congo Atlantic-Congo Gur Northern Oti-Volta Western Southeast Dagbani |
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| Writing system: | Latin alphabet | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | None | |
| ISO 639-2: | nic | |
| ISO 639-3: | dag | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Dagbani is a Gur language spoken by about 800,000 people in Ghana. Its native speakers are primarily of the Dagomba people, but Dagbani is also widely known as a second language in north-eastern Ghana. Dagbani has three dialects, corresponding to the two principal centers Tamale, Ghana (Western Dagbani), Yendi (Yendi or Eastern Dagbani), and Nanuni, the dialect spoken by the Nanumba ethnic group. Dagbani is a member of the Oti-Volta group of Gur and is mutually intelligible with the Mossi language spoken in Burkina Faso.
Contents |
Phonology
Vowels
Dagbani has eleven phonemic vowels: six short and five long vowels:
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | ɨ | u |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Low | a |
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i: | u: | |
| Mid | e: | o: | |
| Low | a: |
Olawsky (1999) has the schwa in place of /ɨ/, unlike other researchers on the language who use the more articulatorily higher /ɨ/. Allophonic variation based on tongue-root advancement is well attested for 4 of these vowels: [i] ~ [ɪ]/[ə], [e] ~ [ɛ], [u] ~ [ʊ] and [o] ~ [ɔ].
Consonants
| Bilabial | Labiodental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Labial-velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | Voiceless | p | t | k | k͡p | ||
| Voiced | b | d | ɡ | ɡ͡b | |||
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ŋ͡m | ||
| Fricative | Voiceless | f | s | ||||
| Voiced | v | z | |||||
| Lateral | l | ||||||
| Approximant | ʋ | j | |||||
Tone
Dagbani is a tonal language in which pitch is used to distinguish words, as in gballi [gbál:ɪ́] (High-High) 'grave' vs. gballi [gbál:ɪ̀] (High-Low) 'zana mat'.1 The tone system of Dagbani is characterized by two level tones and downstep (a lowering effect occurring between sequences of the same phonemic tone).
Writing system
Dagbani is written in an extended version of the Latin alphabet, but the literacy rate is only 2–3%. The orthography currently used represents a number of allophonic distinctions; tone is not marked.
Alphabet
| a | b | ch | d | dz | e | ɛ | f | g | gb | ɣ | h | i | j | k | kp | l | m | n | ny | ŋ | o | ɔ | p | r | s | sh | t | u | w | y | z | ʒ | ’ |
Grammar
Dagbani is agglutinative, but with some fusion of affixes. The constituent order in Dagbani sentences is usually Agent Verb Object.
References
- ^ Olawsky 1997
- Blench, Roger (2006) 'Dagbani plant names' (unpublished circulation draft)
- Olawsky, Knut J. (1999). Aspects of Dagbani grammar, with special emphasis on phonology and morphology. München: LINCOM Europa.
- Olawsky, Knut J. (2003). "What is a word in Dagbani?". in R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Word: A Cross-Linguistic Typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 205–226.
- Olawsky, Knut (1997) 'Interaction of tone and morphology in Dagbani' (unpublished)
External links
- Knut Olawsky's Homepage
- The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive — Dagbani
- Ethnologue report for language code:dag
