Ewe (''Eʋe'' or ''Eʋegbe'' ) is a language spoken by approximately 20 million people in

West Africa West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Maurit ...

, mainly 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 ...

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 ...

and

Benin Benin ( , ; french: Bénin , ff, Benen), officially the Republic of Benin (french: République du Bénin), and formerly Dahomey, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the north ...

, and also in some other countries like

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 ...

and southwestern

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...

. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called the

Gbe languages The Gbe languages (pronounced ) form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widel ...

. The other major Gbe language is Fon, which is mainly spoken in Benin. Like many African languages, Ewe is tonal as well as a possible member of the Niger-Congo family. The German Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann published many dictionaries and grammars of Ewe and several other Gbe languages. Other linguists who have worked on Ewe and closely related languages include Gilbert Ansre (tone, syntax), Herbert Stahlke (morphology, tone),

Nick Clements George Nickerson Clements (October 5, 1940 – August 30, 2009) was an American theoretical linguist specializing in phonology. Career Clements was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and educated in New Haven, Paris and London. He received his Ph.D. fr ...

(tone, syntax),

Roberto Pazzi Roberto Pazzi (born 1946, in Ameglia, Italy) is an Italian novelist and poet. His works have been translated into twenty six languages. Pazzi graduated in classics in Bologna with a thesis on Luciano Anceschi and aesthetics on the poetry of Umb ...

(anthropology, lexicography), Felix K. Ameka (semantics, cognitive linguistics),

Alan Stewart Duthie Alan Stewart Duthie (19 May 1938 - 6 July 2013) was a Scottish linguist and academic who settled and worked in Ghana all his adult life. He was a pioneer in linguistics at the University of Ghana, Legon for 49 years. Early life and education Al ...

(semantics, phonetics), Hounkpati B. Capo (phonology, phonetics),

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(syntax), and Chris Collins (syntax).

Dialects

Some of the commonly named Ewe ('Vhe') dialects are ''Aŋlɔ, Tɔŋu (Tɔŋgu), Avenor,

Agave people The Agave (also Crophy) are an ethnic group of Ghana, belonging to the Ewe people. They are mainly in the west of the Volta River and north of the Songhor Lagoon. The Agave people are one of the largest Ewe subgroups. They live in the southern p ...

, Evedome, Awlan, Gbín, Pekí, Kpándo, Vhlin, Hó, Avɛ́no, Vo, Kpelen, Vɛ́, Danyi, Agu, Fodome, Wancé, Wací, Adángbe'' (Capo). ''

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...

'' 16 considers

Waci Waci (also spelled ''Ouatchi'') is a Gbe language of Togo and Benin. It is part of a dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring variet ...

and Kpesi (Kpessi) to be distinct enough to be considered separate languages. They form a

dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulat ...

with Ewe and

Gen Gen may refer to: * ''Gen'' (film), 2006 Turkish horror film directed by Togan Gökbakar * Gen (Street Fighter), a video game character from the ''Street Fighter'' series * Gen Fu, a video game character from the ''Dead or Alive'' series * Gen l ...

(Mina), which share a mutual intelligibility level of 85%; the Ewe varieties Gbin, Ho, Kpelen, Kpesi, and Vhlin might be considered a third cluster of Western Gbe dialects between Ewe and Gen, but Kpesi is as close or closer to the Waci and Vo dialects, which remain in Ewe in that scenario. Waci intervenes geographically between Ewe proper and Gen; Kpesi forms a Gbe island in the Kabye area. Ewe is itself a dialect cluster of the Gbe languages, which include Gen, Aja, and Xwla and are spoken from the southern part of Ghana to Togo, Benin and Western Nigeria. All Gbe languages share at least some intelligibility with one another. Some coastal and southern dialects of Ewe include Aŋlɔ, Tongu (Tɔŋu), Avenor, Dzodze, and Watsyi. Some inland dialects indigenously characterized as Ewedomegbe include: Ho, Kpedze, Hohoe, Peki,

Kpando Kpando is a town and capital of Kpando Municipal District in the northern Volta Region of Ghana. It is near the north eastern arm of Lake Volta and the Togo border. Kpando is the fifty-fourth most populous place in Ghana, in terms of population, ...

, Aveme, Liati, Fódome, Danyi, and Kpele. Though there are many classifications, distinct variations exist between towns that are just miles away from one another.

Phonology

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Consonants

''H'' is a voiced fricative, which has also been described as

uvular Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not prov ...

, , pharyngeal, , or glottal . Stops are heard as dental . is typically alveolar as , but can also be dental as . The nasal consonants are not distinctive since they appear before only nasal vowels; therefore, Ewe is sometimes said to have no nasal consonants. However, it is more economical to argue that nasal are the underlying form and so are denasalized before oral vowels. occurs before unrounded (non-back) vowels and before rounded (back) vowels. Palatalization of alveolar consonants before a high-front vowel occur in the Southern dialect, and are heard as . Ewe is one of the few languages known to contrast vs. and vs. . The ''f'' and ''v'' are stronger than in most languages, and , with the upper lip noticeably raised, and thus more distinctive from the rather weak and . may occur in consonant clusters. It becomes (or ) after coronals.

Vowels

The tilde (˜) marks nasal vowels, though the Peki dialect lacks . Many varieties of Ewe lack one or another of the front mid vowels, and some varieties in Ghana have the additional vowels and . Ewe does not have a nasal–oral contrast in consonants. It does, however, have a syllabic nasal, which varies as , depending on the following consonant, and carries tone. Some authors treat it as a vowel, with the odd result that Ewe would have more nasal than oral vowels, and one of these vowels has no set place of articulation. If it is taken to be a consonant, there is the odd result of a single nasal consonant that cannot appear before vowels. If nasal consonants are taken to underlie , however, there is no such odd restriction, and the only difference from other consonants is that only nasal stops may be syllabic, a common pattern cross-linguistically.

Tones

Ewe 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 a tonal language, pitch differences are used to distinguish one word from another. For example, in Ewe the following three words differ only by tone: * tó 'mountain' (High tone) * tǒ 'mortar' (Rising tone) * tò 'buffalo' (Low tone) Phonetically, there are three tone registers, High, Mid, and Low, and three rising and falling contour tones. However, most Ewe dialects have only two distinctive registers, High and Mid. These are depressed in nouns after voiced obstruents: High becomes Mid (or Rising), and Mid becomes Low. Mid is also realized as Low at the end of a phrase or utterance, as in the example 'buffalo' above. In writing, tones are marked by acute accent, grave accent, caron, and circumflex. They may be used along with the tilde that marks nasal vowels.

Pragmatics

Ewe has phrases of overt politeness, such as ''meɖekuku'' (meaning "please") and ''akpe'' (meaning "thank you").Translations of "please" and "thank you" from ''Omniglot.com''

Orthography

The

African Reference Alphabet An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (that is, a phoneme) ...

is used when Ewe is represented orthographically, so the written version is somewhat like a combination of the Latin alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet. An "n" is placed after vowels to mark

nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...

. Tone is generally unmarked, except in some common cases, which require disambiguation: the first person plural pronoun ''mí'' 'we' is marked high to distinguish it from the second person plural ''mi'' 'you', and the second person singular pronoun ''wò'' 'you' is marked low to distinguish it from the third person plural pronoun ''wó'' 'they/them' * ekpɔ wò — 'he saw you' * ekpɔ wo — 'he saw them'

Naming system

The Ewe use a system of giving the first name to a child, based on the day of the week that the child was born. That arises from a belief that the real name of a child can be determined only after the child has shown its character. However, as a child is a person, not an object, the child must be referred to by some name in the interim and so a name is provided based on the day of birth. A final name is given at a naming ceremony, seven days after the date of birth. As a matter of pride in their heritage, especially since the 1970s, many educated Ewe, who were given Western names, have dropped those names formally/legally or informally and use their birthday name as their official name. The Ewe birthday-naming system is as follows: Often, people are called by their birthday name most of the time; the given name being used only on formal documents. In such cases, children with the same birth name are delineated by suffixes: -gã meaning big, -vi meaning little. So for example, after the birth of another Kofi, the first child called Kofi becomes Kofigã, and the new child Kofi. A subsequent Kofi, would be Kofivi, or Kofitse, mostly among Wedome and Tɔngu Ewes. Sometimes, the renaming happens twice, as the second Kofi might have originally been called Kofivi, while the eldest retained Kofi, thereby necessitating that they both be renamed on the birth of a third Kofi.

Grammar

Ewe is a subject–verb–object language.Ameka, Felix K. (1991). ''Ewe: Its Grammatical Constructions and Illocutionary Devices''. Australian National University: Sydney. The possessive precedes the head noun.

Adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...

s, numerals, demonstratives and

relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phraseRodney D. Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar'', CUP 2005, p. 183ff. and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments ...

s follow the head noun. Ewe also has

postposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

s rather than prepositions.Warburton, Irene and Ikpotufe, Prosper and Glover, Roland (1968). ''Ewe Basic Course''. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University-African Studies Program. Ewe is well known as a language having

logophoric pronoun Logophoricity is a phenomenon of binding relation that may employ a morphologically different set of anaphoric forms, in the context where the referent is an entity whose speech, thoughts, or feelings are being reported. This entity may or may ...

s. Such pronouns are used to refer to the source of a reported statement or thought in

indirect discourse In linguistics, indirect speech (also reported speech or indirect discourse) is a grammatical mechanism for reporting the content of another utterance without directly quoting it. For example, the English sentence ''Jill said she was coming'' i ...

, and can disambiguate sentences that are ambiguous in most other languages. The following examples illustrate: * Kofi be e-dzo 'Kofi said he left' (he ≠ Kofi) * Kofi be yè-dzo 'Kofi said he left' (he = Kofi) In the second sentence, yè is the logophoric pronoun. Ewe also has a rich system of

serial verb construction The serial verb construction, also known as (verb) serialization or verb stacking, is a syntactic phenomenon in which two or more verbs or verb phrases are strung together in a single clause.Tallerman, M. (1998). ''Understanding Syntax''. London: ...

Status

Ewe is a

national language A national language is a language (or language variant, e.g. dialect) that has some connection—de facto or de jure—with a nation. There is little consistency in the use of this term. One or more languages spoken as first languages in the te ...

and

Citations

General sources

* Ansre, Gilbert (1961) ''The Tonal Structure of Ewe''. MA thesis, Kennedy School of Missions of Hartford Seminary Foundation. * Ameka, Felix Kofi (2001). "Ewe". In Garry and Rubino (eds.), ''Fact About the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages, Past and Present''. New York/Dublin: The H. W. Wilson Company. pp. 207–213. * Clements, George N. (1975)
"The logophoric pronoun in Ewe: Its role in discourse"
''Journal of West African Languages''. 10(2): 141–177. * Collins, Chris. (1993) ''Topics in Ewe Syntax''. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT. * Capo, Hounkpati B. C. (1991). ''A Comparative Phonology of Gbe'', Publications in African Languages and Linguistics, 14. Berlin/New York: Foris Publications & Garome, Bénin: Labo Gbe (Int). * Pasch, Helma (1995). ''Kurzgrammatik des Ewe''. Köln: Köppe. * Westermann, Diedrich Hermann (1930). ''A Study of the Ewe Language''. London: Oxford University Press.

bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...

in Ewe language by Jehovah's Witnesses
Ewe Bible (Èʋegbe Biblia) Nublabla Xoxo and Yeye
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ewe Language Ewe people Gbe languages Languages of Ghana Languages of Togo Subject–verb–object languages