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Dagbani language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Dagbani | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Ghana | |
| Total speakers: | ~800,000 | |
| Language family: | Niger-Congo Atlantic-Congo Volta-Congo North Gur Central Gur Northern Oti-Volta Western Southeast Dagbani |
|
| 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. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
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 two dialects, corresponding to the two principal centers Tamale (Western Dagbani) and Yendi (Yendi or Eastern Dagbani). Dagbani is a member of the Oti-Volta group of Gur.
Contents |
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | u | |
| Mid | e | ə | o |
| Low | a |
| 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 | |||||
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).
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.
Dagbani is agglutinative, but with some fusion of affixes. The constituent order in Dagbani sentences is usually Agent Verb Object.
- ^ 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- Blench, Roger (2006) 'Dagbani plant names' (unpublished circulation draft)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, 205–226.
- Olawsky, Knut (1997) 'Interaction of tone and morphology in Dagbani' (unpublished)