Mpre language

Not to be confused with Mbre language.

Mpre

Pronunciation

ḿpŕ̩ɛ̀

Spoken in

mid 20th century

Kwa?
- Mpre

Language codes

ISO 639-3

None

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Mpre aka Mpra is a language once spoken in the village of Butie () in Ghana, near the confluence of the Black and White Voltas, that has been difficult to classify. It is known only from a 70-word list given in a 1931 article.

Painter (1967) briefly states that "ḿpŕ̩ɛ̀ has died" and that the ethnic group ("the Nnyamase-mprɛ") have "become Nnyamase-Gonja"; he appears to regard it as having been a dialect of Gonja. This is based only on the numerals, which are clearly related to Gonja. The rest of the vocabulary, however, is "hard to recognise" (Williamson & Blench, 2000:36). Blench (2010), however, presents it as a Kwa language.

Bibliography

Blench, Roger. 2010. "Why is Africa so Linguistically Undiverse?".[1] Language Isolates in Africa workshop, Lyon, December 3–4
Cardinall, A.W. 1931. "A survival". Gold Coast Review, V,1:193-197.
Painter, Colin. 1967. "The Distribution of Guang in Ghana, and a Statistical Pre-Testing on Twenty-Five Idiolects," The Journal of West African Languages, Vol. 4, No. 1, Cambridge University Press, Ibadan, pp. 25–78.

External links

Blench, Roger (1999) Recent Field Work in Ghana: Report on Dompo and a note on Mpre.