Dagbani language

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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/FDIS 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.

1 Phonology
2 Writing system
3 Grammar
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Phonology

[edit] Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e	ə	o
Low		a

[edit] Consonants

		Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labial-velar
Stop	Voiceless	p		t		k	k͡p
Stop	Voiced	b		d		ɡ	ɡ͡b
Nasal		m		n	ɲ	ŋ	ŋ͡m
Fricative	Voiceless		f	s
Fricative	Voiced		v	z
Lateral				l
Approximant			ʋ		j

[edit] 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 occuring between sequences of the same phonemic tone).

[edit] 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.

[edit] Grammar

Dagbani is agglutinative, but with some fusion of affixes. The constituent order in Dagbani sentences is usually Agent Verb Object.

[edit] 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Blench, Roger (2006) 'Dagbani plant names' (unpublished circulation draft)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?”, 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Olawsky, Knut (1997) 'Interaction of tone and morphology in Dagbani' (unpublished)