Dan is a
Southern Mande language spoken primarily in
Ivory Coast
Ivory Coast, also known as Côte d'Ivoire, officially the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, is a country on the southern coast of West Africa. Its capital is Yamoussoukro, in the centre of the country, while its largest city and economic centre is ...
(~800,000 speakers) and
Liberia
Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to its north, Ivory Coast to its east, and the Atlantic Ocean ...
(150,000–200,000 speakers). There is also a population of about 800 speakers in
Guinea
Guinea ( ),, fuf, 𞤘𞤭𞤲𞤫, italic=no, Gine, wo, Gine, nqo, ߖߌ߬ߣߍ߫, bm, Gine officially the Republic of Guinea (french: République de Guinée), is a coastal country in West Africa. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the we ...
. Dan 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 empha ...
, with around 9-11 contour and register tones depending on the dialect.
Alternative names for the language include Yacouba or Yakubasa, Gio, Gyo, Gio-Dan, and Da. Dialects are Gio (Liberian Dan), Gweetaawu (Eastern Dan), Blowo (Western Dan), and Kla. Kla is evidently a distinct language.
Phonology
Vowels
¹Only in Liberian Dan
²Only in Eastern Dan
Consonants
¹Only in Liberian Dan
²Not in Liberian Dan
³Not in western Dan
Writing system
The orthography of Liberia includes this alphabet:
The capital ɤ will be encoded in a future version of The
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
Standard.
Tones are marked as follows:
extra high tone: a̋;
high tone: á;
medium tone: ā;
low tone: à;
extra low tone: ȁ;
high drop tone: â;
extra low hanging tone: aʼ.
The digraphs keep the same values as in the spelling of 1982, and the nasal vowels are also indicated by appending the letter n after the letter of the vowel .
References
External links
English-Dan Online Dictionary*Roberts, David, Ginger Boyd, Johannes Merz, & Valentin Vydrin. 2020. Quantifying written ambiguities in tone languages: A comparative study of Elip, Mbelime, and Eastern Dan. ''
Language Documentation & Conservation
''Language Documentation & Conservation'' is a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal covering all topics related to language documentation and conservation, including the goals of data management, field-work methods, ethics, orthography desig ...
'' 14: 108-138. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24915.
Mande languages
Languages of Ivory Coast
Languages of Guinea
Languages of Liberia
Dan people
{{Mande-lang-stub