Grebo is a

dialect cluster A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...

of the

Kru languages The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast. Classification According to Güldemann (2018), Kru lacks sufficient lexical resemblances and noun class resemblances to conclude a relati ...

, spoken by the

Grebo people The Grebo or Glebo people are an ethnic group or subgroup within the larger Kru group of Africa, a language and cultural ethnicity, and to certain of its constituent elements. Within Liberia members of this group are found primarily in Maryland ...

of present-day

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 the Krumen of

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 ...

in West Africa.

Definition

The first African tribal group contacted by European explorers and Americo-Liberian colonists reaching the area of

Cape Palmas Cape Palmas is a headland on the extreme southeast end of the coast of Liberia, Africa, at the extreme southwest corner of the northern half of the continent. The Cape itself consists of a small, rocky peninsula connected to the mainland by a s ...

were the Seaside Grebo, or Glebo.Classified as a dialect of Southern Grebo by

ISO 639-3 ISO 639-3:2007, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages'', is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for i ...

. The colonists came to refer to their language as ''Grebo''. In the absence of other qualification, the term ''Grebo language'' refers to the ''Glebo'' speech variety. Considerable ambiguity and imprecision continue to exist with respect to the scholarly use of the term Grebo; it is not always clear precisely which variety it is intended to denote. If it is being used as a group term, it is not always clear what is to be included in the group. This imprecision results from several factors: *The incompleteness of the data; *Lack of rigor in the classification methodology; and *The speech area involved is a

language continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...

''Ethnologue'' classification

''Ethnologue'' subdivides the Grebo branch of Western Kru into nine coded languages based on the needs of literacy, several consisting of divergent dialects with strong ethnocentric identities. * Glio-Oubi * Krumen (3 languages in Côte d'Ivoire) * Grebo proper (5 languages) Any of the twenty-five or more dialects in the group is likely to be called (a variety of) ''Grebo.''

Multilingualism

A degree of

bilingualism Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...

/ bidialectalism is normal in such a context, but so is the commonly observed thrust for autonomy. Factors such as

exogamy Exogamy is the social norm of marrying outside one's social group. The group defines the scope and extent of exogamy, and the rules and enforcement mechanisms that ensure its continuity. One form of exogamy is dual exogamy, in which two groups c ...

and the needs of commerce foster intercommunication strategies. Because of the emphasis on the need for communication, the degree of inter-intelligibility of the varieties appears to be less than if they were considered in isolation.

Diglossia In linguistics, diglossia () is a situation in which two dialects or languages are used (in fairly strict compartmentalization) by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety (labeled " ...

(extended or not), often with Liberian (Pidgin) English, provides an additional dimension to the complexity described above.

References

Bibliography

*Innes, Gordon. 1966. ''An Introduction to Grebo.'' London: Luzac. *Innes, Gordon. 1967. ''A Grebo-English dictionary.'' (''West African Language Monographs'', 6) London: Cambridge University Press. *Ingemann, Frances, and John Duitsman. "A Survey of Grebo Dialects in Liberia," ''Liberian Studies Journal'', 7(2):121-131, 1976. * Greenberg, Joseph H., ''

The Languages of Africa ''The Languages of Africa'' is a 1963 book of essays by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, in which the author sets forth a genetic classification of African languages that, with some changes, continues to be the most commonly used one today. It is a ...

''. Indiana Univ. Press, 1966). *Hasselbring, Sue and Eric Johnson. ''A sociolinguistic survey of the Grebo language area of Liberia. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-074'', 2002. Online version:

*Payne, John. 1867. ''A Dictionary of the Grebo Language.'' Philadelphia: King and Baird.

External links

*US Navy map of ''Maryland in Liberia'', 1853

{{Kru languages Grebo languages, Languages of Liberia Kru languages