Dagbani language
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Dagbani (or Dagbane), also known as Dagbanli and Dagbanle, is a
Gur language The Gur languages, also known as Central Gur or Mabia, belong to the Niger–Congo languages. They are spoken in the Sahelian and savanna regions of West Africa, namely: in most areas of Burkina Faso, and in south-central Mali, northeastern Iv ...
spoken in
Ghana Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...
and Northern
Togo Togo (), officially the Togolese Republic (french: République togolaise), is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, where its c ...
. Its native speakers are estimated around 3,160,000. It is a compulsory subject in primary and junior high school in the
Dagbon Kingdom The Kingdom of Dagbon is one of the oldest and most organised traditional kingdoms in Ghana founded by the Dagomba people (Dagbamba) in the 11th century. During its rise, it comprised, at various points, the Northern, Upper West, Upper East and ...
, which covers the eastern part of Ghana. Dagbani is the most widely spoken
language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
in northern
Ghana Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...
, especially among acephalous tribes overseen by the King of Dagbon, the ''
Ya-Na This is a tree of the monarchs of the traditional Kingdom of Dagbon, the kingdom of the Dagomba people, located in northern Ghana. The term ''Yaa-Naa'' means "king of strength" in the Dagbani language. It was adopted by king (''Naa'') Shitobu, a ...
''. It is closely related to and mutually intelligible with the
Mampelle language The Mamprusi language is a Gur language spoken in northern Ghana, Northern Togo, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Mali by the Mamprusi people. It is partially mutually intelligible with Dagbani. The Mamprusi language is spoken in a broad belt acros ...
, also spoken in
Northern Region, Ghana The Northern Region is one of the sixteen regions of Ghana. It is located in the north of the country and was the largest of the sixteen regions, covering an area of 70,384 square kilometres or 31 percent of Ghana's area until December 2018 when ...
. Dagbani is also similar to the other languages of the same subgroup spoken in this region, the
Dagaare Dagaare is the language of the Dagaaba people of Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast. It has been described as a dialect continuum that also includes Waale and Birifor. Dagaare language varies in dialect stemming from other family languages i ...
and
Wali A wali (''wali'' ar, وَلِيّ, '; plural , '), the Arabic word which has been variously translated "master", "authority", "custodian", "protector", is most commonly used by Muslims to indicate an Islamic saint, otherwise referred to by the ...
languages, spoken in
Upper West Region The Upper West Region of Ghana is located in the north-western corner of Ghana and is bordered by Upper East region to the east, Northern region to the south, and Burkina Faso to the west and north. The Upper West regional capital and largest se ...
of Ghana, and the
Frafra language Gurene, also known as Gurenne, Frafra, Farefare or Gurune, is the language of the Gurene people of northern Ghana, particularly the Upper East Region, and southern Burkina Faso. It is a national language of Ghana, and is closely related to Dagba ...
, spoken in
Upper East Region The Upper East Region is located in north Ghana and is the third smallest of the 16 administrative regions in Ghana. It occupies a total land surface of 8,842 square kilometers or 2.7 per cent of the total land area of Ghana. The Upper East regi ...
of Ghana.


In Togo

In
Togo Togo (), officially the Togolese Republic (french: République togolaise), is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, where its c ...
, Dagbani is spoken in the Savanes Region at the border with Ghana.


Dialects

Dagbani has a major
dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety (linguisti ...
split between Eastern Dagbani, centred on the traditional capital town of
Yendi Yendi is a town and the capital of Yendi Municipal district in the Northern Region of Ghana. As of 2012 the population of Yendi was 52,008 people. It is the seat of the King of the Dagombas. Climate Economy The people of Yendi are mainly ...
, and Western Dagbani, centred on the administrative capital of the Northern Region,
Tamale A tamale, in Spanish tamal, is a traditional Mesoamerican dish made of masa, a dough made from nixtamalized corn, which is steamed in a corn husk or banana leaf. The wrapping can either be discarded prior to eating or used as a plate. Tamale ...
. The dialects are, however, mutually intelligible, and mainly consist of different
root vowels A root (or root word) is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the prim ...
in some
lexemes A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken ...
, and different forms or pronunciations of some nouns, particularly those referring to local flora. The words ''Dagbani'' and ''Dagbanli'' given above for the name of the language are respectively the Eastern and Western dialect forms of the name, but the Dagbani Orthography Committee resolved that “It was decided that in the spelling system is used to refer to the ... Language, and ... to the life and culture”; in the spoken language, each dialect uses its form of the name for both functions.


Orthography

Dagbani is written in a
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
with the addition of the apostrophe, the letters ɛ, ɣ, ŋ, ɔ, and ʒ, and the digraphs ch, gb, kp, ŋm, sh and ny. The
literacy Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, huma ...
rate used to be only 2–3%. This percentage is expected to rise as Dagbani is now a compulsory subject in primary and junior secondary school all over
Dagbon The Kingdom of Dagbon is one of the oldest and most organised traditional kingdoms in Ghana founded by the Dagomba people (Dagbamba) in the 11th century. During its rise, it comprised, at various points, the Northern, Upper West, Upper East and ...
. The
orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...
currently used (Orthography Committee /d(1998)) represents a number of
allophonic In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
distinctions. Tone is not marked.


Phonology


Vowels

Dagbani has eleven phonemic vowels – six short vowels and five long vowels: Olawsky (1999) puts the
schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...
(ə) in place of , unlike other researchers on the language who use the higher articulated .
Allophonic In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
variation based on tongue-root advancement is well attested for 4 of these vowels: ~ , ~ , ~ and ~ .


Consonants

* [] mainly occurs phonemically among other Western dialects. * debuccalizes as a glottal when in intervocalic position. debuccalizes as a glottal stop post-vocalic position. * Sounds are realized as when preceding front vowels. * can be heard as when in post-vocalic positions.


Tone

Dagbani is a
tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
in which pitch is used to distinguish words, as in ''gballi'' (high-high) 'grave' vs. ''gballi'' (high-low) 'zana mat'. The tone system of Dagbani is characterised by two level tones and
downstep Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first. Two main kinds of downstep can be distin ...
(a lowering effect occurring between sequences of the same phonemic tone).


Grammar

Dagbani is
agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...
, but with some
fusion Fusion, or synthesis, is the process of combining two or more distinct entities into a new whole. Fusion may also refer to: Science and technology Physics *Nuclear fusion, multiple atomic nuclei combining to form one or more different atomic nucl ...
of affixes. The constituent order in Dagbani sentences is usually agent–verb–object.


Lexicon

There is an insight into a historical stage of the language in the papers of Rudolf Fisch reflecting data collected during his missionary work in the
German Togoland Togoland was a German Empire protectorate in West Africa from 1884 to 1914, encompassing what is now the nation of Togo and most of what is now the Volta Region of Ghana, approximately 90,400 km2 (29,867 sq mi) in size. During the period kno ...
colony in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially the lexical list, though there is also some grammatical information and sample texts. A more modern glossary was published in 1934 by a southern Ghanaian officer of the colonial government, E. Foster Tamakloe, in 1934, with a revised edition by British officer Harold Blair. Various editors added to the wordlist and a more complete publication was produced in 2003 by a Dagomba scholar, Ibrahim Mahama. According to the linguist Salifu Nantogma Alhassan, there is evidence to suggest that there are gender-related double standards in the Dagbani language with "more labels that trivialise females than males." Meanwhile, the data was electronically compiled by John Miller Chernoff and
Roger Blench Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and work ...
(whose version is published online), and converted to a database by
Tony Naden Tony Naden is a British lexicographer who specializes on Western Oti-Volta subgroup of Gur languages The Gur languages, also known as Central Gur or Mabia, belong to the Niger–Congo languages. They are spoken in the Sahelian and savanna ...
, on the basis of which a full-featured dictionary is ongoing and can be viewed online.


Noun Class System


Pronouns

Each set of personal pronouns in Dagbani is distinguished regarding
person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
,
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...
and animacy. Besides the distinction between singular and plural, there is an additional distinction between /- animatein the 3rd person. Moreover, Dagbani distinguishes between emphatic and non-emphatic pronouns and there are no gender distinctions. While there is no morphological differentiation between grammatical cases, pronouns can occur in different forms according to whether they appear pre- or postverbally.


Non-emphatic Pronouns


= Preverbal

= Preverbal pronouns serve as subjects of a verb and are all monosyllabic.


= Postverbal

= Postverbal pronouns usually denote objects. Given the fact that preverbal and postverbal pronouns do not denote two complementary sets, one could refer to them as unmarked or specifically marked for postverbal occurrence.


Emphatic Pronouns

Emphatic pronouns in Dagbani serve as regular pronouns in that they can stand in isolation, preverbally or postverbally.


Reciprocal Pronouns

Reciprocals are formed by the addition of the word ''taba'' after the verb.


Reflexive Pronouns

Reflexive pronouns are formed by the suffix ''-maŋa'', which is attached to the non-emphatic preverbal pronoun. The affix ''maŋa'' can also occur as an emphatic pronoun after nouns.


Possessive Pronouns

The possessive pronouns in Dagbani exactly correspond to the preverbal non-emphatic pronouns, which always proceed the possessed constituent.


Relative Pronouns

In Dagbani the relative pronouns are ''ŋʊn'' ("who") and ''ni'' ("which"). The relative pronouns in Dagbani are not obligatory present and can also be absent depending on the context, as the following example illustrates. Relative pronouns in Dagbani can also be complex in its nature, such that they consist of two elements, an indefinite pronoun and an emphatic pronoun.


Interrogative Pronouns

Interrogative pronouns in Dagbani make a distinction between human and non-human. Additionally, interrogative pronouns inflect for number, but not all of them. Those inflecting for number belong to the semantic categories +THING +SELECTION +PERSON


Demonstrative Pronouns

Demonstrative pronouns in Dagbani make a morphological difference between the singular and plural form. The demonstrative pronoun ''ŋɔ'' moves to the specifier of the functional NumP and if Num is plural, then the plural morphem ''-nímá'' attaches to the demonstrative pronoun. If Num is singular, there is a zero morphem, such that the demonstrative pronoun does not differ in its morphological form.


Indefinite Pronouns

Dagbani distinguishes not only between singular and plural for indefinite pronouns, but also between /-animate Therefore, there are two pairs of indefinite pronouns. Indefinites are basically used in the same way as adjectives, as their morphological form is similar to that of nouns and adjectives. In order to express an indefinite like "something" the inanimate singular form is combined with the noun ''bini'' ("thing").


Syntax


Word Order

Dagbani has a rigid SVO word order. In the canonical sentence structure, the verb precedes the direct and indirect object as well as adverbials. The clause structure exhibits varying functional elements projecting various functional phrasal categories including tense, aspect, negation, mood and the conjoint/disjoint paradigm.


Verb Phrase

The VP in Dagbani consists of a preverbal particle encoding tense, aspect and mood, the main verb, and a postverbal particle which marks focus.


Preverbal Particles


= Major Particles

=


Main Verb

Each verb in Dagbani has two forms, a perfective and an imperfective form with very few exceptions. In general, the perfective form is the unmarked form, whereas the imperfective form corresponds to the progressive form, or in other words it refers to an action, which is still in progress. The perfective is nearly syncretic with the infinitive, which in turn has an ''/n-/''-prefix. The imperfective is formed by the suffix ''/-di/''. The inflectional system in Dagbani is relatively poor as compared to other languages. There is no grammatical agreement, since number and person are not marked. Tense is marked only under certain constraints. Basically, Dagbani makes a distinction between future and non-future, however the main distinction does not concern Tense, but Aspect and occurs between perfective and imperfective.


Postverbal Particles

The postverbal particle ''la'' marks presentational focus, rather than contrastive focus. In comparison to the postverbal particle in Dagaare, the function of this Dagbani particle is also not yet fully investigated. There are native speakers, who consider the particle to indicate that what is expressed to the hearer is not shared knowledge. Issah (2013) on the other hand argues that the presence of la asserts new information, while its absence indicates old information.


Conjoint / Disjoint Markers


Questions

In Dagbani, the question word can either appear in situ or ex situ.


Ex situ

The basic word order in Dagbani questions is SVO, such that the question word is fronted and followed by the focus marker ''ka''. This is the unmarked form and accepted by many native speakers as "natural".


In situ

Yes-/No-question in Dagbani are formed by the disjunction ''bee'' ('or'), which either conjoints two propositions or which occurs sentence-finally to indicate that the sentence with SVO order is actually a question. In addition to Yes-/No-questions, the question word can also occur in sentence-final position. This might correspond to
echo questions An echo question is a question that seeks to confirm or clarify another speaker's utterance (the ''stimulus''), by repeating it back in some form. For example: A: I'm moving to Greenland. B: You're moving ''where''?? In English, echo questions ...
.


Dagbani language scholars

* Fusheini Hudu * Knut Olawsky *
Roger Blench Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and work ...
*
Tony Naden Tony Naden is a British lexicographer who specializes on Western Oti-Volta subgroup of Gur languages The Gur languages, also known as Central Gur or Mabia, belong to the Niger–Congo languages. They are spoken in the Sahelian and savanna ...
* Samuel Alhassan Issah


References


External links


Knut Olawsky's HomepageDagbani kasahorow online dictionaryDagbane dictionary
(PDF) * Web version of Ethnologue
The VP-periphery in Mabia languages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dagbani Language Oti–Volta languages Languages of Ghana