| Also Known As: Dagomba,Dagbane,Dagbamba
Description:
Dagbani is a Gur language spoken by about 800,000 people in Ghana. Its native speakers are primarily of the Dagomba people, but Dagbani is also widely known as a second language in north-eastern Ghana. Dagbani has three dialects, corresponding to the two principal centers Tamale, Ghana (Western Dagbani), Yendi (Yendi or Eastern Dagbani), and Nanuni, the dialect spoken by the Nanumba ethnic group. Dagbani is a member of the Oti-Volta group of Gur and is mutually intelligible with the Mossi language spoken in Burkina Faso.
Dagbani has eleven phonemic vowels: six short and five long vowels:
Olawsky (1999) has the schwa in place of /ɨ/, unlike other researchers on the language who use the more articulatorily higher /ɨ/. Allophonic variation based on tongue-root advancement is well attested for 4 of these vowels: [i] ~ [ɪ]/[ə], [e] ~ [ɛ], [u] ~ [ʊ] and [o] ~ [ɔ].
Dagbani is a tonal language in which pitch is used to distinguish words, as in gballi [gbál:ɪ́] (High-High) 'grave' vs. gballi [gbál:ɪ̀] (High-Low) 'zana mat'. The tone system of Dagbani is characterized by two level tones and downstep (a lowering effect occurring between sequences of the same phonemic tone).
Dagbani is written..... full article at Wikipedia |
