Mbato, also known as Mbatto, Nghlwa, Potu or Gwa, is a

Kwa language The Kwa languages, often specified as New Kwa, are a proposed but as-yet-undemonstrated family of languages spoken in the south-eastern part of Ivory Coast, across southern Ghana, and in central Togo. The name was introduced 1895 by Gottlob Kra ...

spoken in

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 ...

and 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 ...

. It is one of two Potou languages, along with Ebrié. The Mbato people primarily live in the

La Mé La Mé Region (also known as Massan Region) is one of the 31 regions of Ivory Coast. Since its establishment in 2011, it has been one of three regions in Lagunes District. The seat of the region is Adzopé and the region's population in the 2021 ce ...

region of Ivory Coast, particularly in the sub-prefecture of Oghlwapo in the Alépé department.

Phonology

Mbato has no

nasal consonant In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majorit ...

phonemes, but the

nasal vowels A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced witho ...

(see table below) cause the sonorants [ɓ, l, j, w] to assimilate and be pronounced as [m, n, ɲ, ŋʷ]. There are two

bilabial In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tli ...

implosive Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism.''Phonetics for communication disorders.'' Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller. R ...

phonemes, /ɓ¹/ and /ɓ²/. The first is always pronounced as � while the second is pronounced in the context of a nasal vowel. The sounds , v, zare marginal and occur only in

loanwords A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because the ...

. While the Proto-

Potou Potou District () is a district of Zhanjiang Zhanjiang (), historically spelled Tsamkong, is a prefecture-level city at the southwestern end of Guangdong province, People's Republic of China, facing Haikou city to the south. As of the 2020 ...

language likely had an ±

ATR ATR may refer to: Medicine * Acute transfusion reaction * Ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3 related, a protein involved in DNA damage repair Science and mathematics * Advanced Test Reactor, nuclear research reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory, ...

system, it has disappeared from Ebrié and left only traces in Mbato. Mbato has a tonal system consisting of three level tones.

Grammar

Noun Classes

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 Word stem, stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy'' ...

in Mbato serve to distinguish between certain

homophones A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (p ...

and between singular and plural forms. Originally, this system would have been more robust, as seen in other Niger-Congo languages. The four nominal prefixes are ó-, à-, ʊ́̃-, and ʊ̃̀-. The latter two, which are nasal vowels, can also be realized as syllabic nasals, transcribed as ɴ́- and ɴ̀-.

References

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