Ebrié, or Cama (Caman, Kyama, Tchaman, Tsama, Tyama), is spoken by the

Tchaman The Tchaman or Ébrié are an Akan people living in the Abidjan region of Côte d'Ivoire. Originally called the "Tchaman/Kyama/Gyama" or "Achan" (both of which mean "the chosen ones" in the Ebrié language), the name Ébrié was given to them by ...

people in

Ivory Coast Ivory Coast, also known as Côte d'Ivoire and officially the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, is a country on the southern coast of West Africa. Its capital city of Yamoussoukro is located in the centre of the country, while its largest List of ci ...

and

Ghana Ghana, officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It is situated along the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and shares borders with Côte d’Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, and Togo to t ...

. It is a Potou language of the Kwa branch of the Niger–Congo family of languages.

Phonology

Phonemic Inventory

The sounds and are marginal and occur only in

loanwords A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

. There are no nasal consonant

phonemes A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

in Ebrié. Instead, the nasal vowels cause the voiced lenis consonant series �, ɗ, j, wto assimilate into , n, ɲ, ŋʷ

Tones

Ebrié has two level tones (H and L) and a falling tone (HL). It also has floating tones, and the voiced fortis consonants have a tendency to lower the pitch of the low tone.

Morphology

Nominal Prefixes

The

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

prefixes A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can b ...

in Ebrié distinguish between certain

homophones A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning or in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (past tense of "rise"), or spelled differently, a ...

and between singular and

plural In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...

forms. Originally, this system would have been more robust, as seen in other Niger-Congo languages. The four nominal prefixes are ''á-, à-, ɛ̃́-'', and ''ɛ̃̀''-. The latter two, which are nasal vowels, can also be realized as syllabic nasals, transcribed as ''ɴ́''- and ''ɴ̀''- but written orthographically as . The second noun in a compound retains its prefix, as shown below.

Plural Nouns

Nouns can be made plural through the use of nominal prefixes or plural suffixes. Certain nouns are irregular or invariable. When a singular noun begins with the prefix á- or à-, its plural form will have the prefix ń- or ǹ- respectively. If a singular noun lacks a prefix, it will often have the prefix ń- in the plural. Other nouns take one of the plural suffixes -mã́, -hɔ̃̀, or -mã́hɔ̃̀. * áyá /ájá/ 'tree' → ńyá /ńjá/ 'trees' * agban /àg͡bã́/ 'plate' → ngbán /ǹg͡bã́/ 'plates * lalabhô àlàɓô'duck' → ńlalabho �làlàɓô'ducks' * mmanhɔn ̀mã̀hɔ̀̃'mothers' * nmyahɔn �mjã̂hɔ̃̀'spouses'

Subject Pronouns

In Ebrié, tense/aspect/mood markers are found on the

verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

or as separate

morphemes A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

if the subject is a

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

or a plural

subject pronoun In linguistics, a subject pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used as the subject of a verb. Subject pronouns are usually in the nominative case for languages with a nominative–accusative alignment pattern. On the other hand, a language with ...

. The singular subject pronouns merge with the TAM markers, resulting in morphophonemic changes. For exampleː

Syntax

Ebrié is a SVO language, as seen in the following example.

Orthography

The high tone is marked with the acute accent (''ájí'' 'respect'), and the low tone is left unmarked (''aji'' 'clay'). The falling tone is marked with a circumflex (â). The apostrophe (') is used to mark the habitual form of the verb.

References

Potou–Tano languages Languages of Ivory Coast {{kwa-lang-stub