Dan is a
Southern Mande language spoken primarily in
Ivory Coast (~800,000 speakers) and
Liberia (150,000–200,000 speakers). There is also a population of about 800 speakers in
Guinea. 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 emph ...
, 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 standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
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