Gen (also called Gɛ̃, Gɛn gbe, Gebe, Guin, Mina, Mina-Gen, and Popo) is a Gbe language spoken in the southeast of

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 ...

in the Maritime Region. Like the other Gbe languages, Gen 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 ...

History

The Gen-Mina originated from Accra and Elmina in Ghana. The Mina from Elmina migrated because of the Denkyira wars of aggression, while the Gen came over from Accra after their defeat in the Akwamu wars. The two groups intermingled with the indigenous Ewe, resulting in their Ewe dialect having words borrowed from Fanti, Ga-Adangbe and various European languages. The Gen language is

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as a ...

with Ewe and is considered to be one of the many dialects of Ewe. There were 200,000 Gen-speakers in Togo in 1991, and 130,000 in Benin in 2006.

References

*Kangni, Atah-Ekoué (1989) ''La syntaxe du Gẽ: étude syntaxique d'un parler Gbe: le Gẽ du Sud-Togo.'' Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Gbe languages Languages of Togo Languages of Benin {{VoltaNiger-lang-stub