Nawdm 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 ...

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 Ghana. There are about 8000 of the speakers 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 200 000 speakers in Togo.

Nawdm in Ghana

Nawdm is spoken in the Greater Accra ( capital city of Ghana) and in the Volta Region(now Region of Volta and Oti). It is known by several names including "loso" (or "losu"), and "nawdm" (sometimes spelled "naoudem" or "nawdam"). The first of these terms is improper and ambiguous. It is given by other language groups to refer to the Lamba (those who do not speak Nawdm) and the Nawdba (those who speak Nawdm).

Nawdm In Togo

It is spoken in the Prefecture of Doufelgou. Doufelgou is located in the Kara Region. It is spoken precisely in five places called cantons. Namely: Niamtougou, Koka, Baga, Ténéga and Siou. Nawdm is also spoken in the villages of Bogawaré and Kawa-Bas in the canton of Pouda, and in the village of Koré-Nata in the canton of Massédéna, still in the prefecture of Doufelgou. Historically, the latter are the descendants of the village of Banaa, formerly located roughly equidistant from Koka, Ténéga and Siou-Kpadb, on the outskirts of what is now called SORAD, from where they were driven out by the people of Baga shortly before the arrival of the Germans. The immediate neighbors of the Nawdba in this prefecture are: in the North, the Lamba of Défalé; in the South, the Kabyè of Pya; to the east, the Kabyè of Massédéna and Péssaré; to the west, the Lamba of Agbandé and of Yaka. According to the most recent classifications of Bendor-Samuel in 1989 and those of Heine and Nurse in 2004, the nawdm belongs to the yom – nawdm group of the Oti-Volta subfamily of the central Gur or Voltaic languages, the gur family being a branch Niger-Congo languages. These classifications are based on the work of historical and comparative linguistics of Gabriel Manessy who demonstrated that nawdm was not, as some had initially believed, a dialect of Mooré, but a language which, while certainly being related to Mooré, however, belongs to another linguistic sub-group. Nawdm is only spoken among its speakers. A few rare non-native speakers are also interested in this language. It is a very beautiful language especially when listening to the sounds while singing. The term Losso is a vague local designation, never employed by linguists, referring to both the Nawdm and Lamba people.

Orthography

To distinguish a sequence of two consonants and a consonant represented by two letters, the diaeresis is used on the first letters of the sequence of two consonants, for example: the sequence of consonants (g̈w, g̈b, n̈y, ŋ̈m). The uppercase letter Ĥ corresponds to the lowercase letter ɦ (the usual correspondence would be Ĥ/ĥ and Ɦ/ɦ). The

high tone 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 ...

is denoted by the

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...

and the

low tone 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 ...

is denoted by the

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using t ...

, although in usual writing, the tone is only written in pronouns.

External links

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References

Oti–Volta languages Languages of Togo {{gur-lang-stub