Dagbani
Dagbane
Spoken in	Ghana
Total speakers	~800,000
Language family	Niger-Congo Atlantic-Congo Savannas Gur Northern Gur Oti-Volta Western Oti-Volta Southeast Dagbani
Writing system	Latin alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	nic
ISO 639-3	dag
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Contents 1 the Great Dagbon Kindomlink title 2 Phonology 2.1 Vowels 2.2 Consonants 2.3 Tone 3 Writing system 3.1 Alphabet 4 Grammar 5 References 6 External links

[edit] the Great Dagbon Kindomlink title

Dagbani is a Gur language spoken by about 4,853,000 people in Ghana that include Dagomba, mumprusi, nanunbe, Moshi, Gurusi, Frafra, and komkomba. these are ehtnic group which are related to Dagbani, generaly and the tribes in Northern Ghana are related to dagbani. Its native speakers are primarily of the Dagomba people, but Dagbani is also widely known as a first language in northern Ghana. it has been stated in history that the Dagbon kingdom was the first kingdom in Ghana hundreds of years before coloniel powers came. it has been mentioned that they were enskining their chiefs full hundred year (century) before Ashanti foud their kingdom. Dagbani has four (6) 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 Mumpuruli, Frafra, Gurusi, Komkomba.

[edit] Phonology

[edit] Vowels

Dagbani has eleven phonemic vowels: six short and five long vowels:

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

	Front	Central	Back
High	iː		uː
Mid	eː		oː
Low		aː

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].

[edit] Consonants

		Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labial-velar
Stop	Voiceless	p		t		k	k͡p
	Voiced	b		d		ɡ	ɡ͡b
Nasal		m		n	ɲ	ŋ	ŋ͡m
Fricative	Voiceless		f	s
	Voiced		v	z
Lateral				l
Approximant			ʋ		j

[edit] Tone

Dagbani is a tonal language in which pitch is used to distinguish words, as in gballi [ɡbálːɪ́] (High-High) 'grave' vs. gballi [ɡbálːɪ̀] (High-Low) 'zana mat'.^[1] The tone system of Dagbani is characterized by two level tones and downstep (a lowering effect occurring between sequences of the same phonemic tone).

[edit] Writing system

Dagbani is written in an extended version of the Latin alphabet, but the literacy rate is only 2–3%. The orthography currently used represents a number of allophonic distinctions; tone is not marked.

[edit] Alphabet

a

b

ch

d

dz

e

ɛ

f

g

gb

ɣ

h

i

j

k

kp

l

m

n

ny

ŋ

o

ɔ

p

r

s

sh

t

u

w

y

z

ʒ

’

[edit] Grammar

Dagbani is agglutinative, but with some fusion of affixes. The constituent order in Dagbani sentences is usually Agent Verb Object.

[edit] References

• Blench, Roger (2006) 'Dagbani plant names' (unpublished circulation draft)
• Olawsky, Knut J. (1999). Aspects of Dagbani grammar, with special emphasis on phonology and morphology. München: LINCOM Europa. 
• Olawsky, Knut J. (2003). "What is a word in Dagbani?". in R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Word: A Cross-Linguistic Typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 205–226. 
• Olawsky, Knut (1997) 'Interaction of tone and morphology in Dagbani' (unpublished)

[edit] External links

• Knut Olawsky's Homepage
• The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive — Dagbani
• Ethnologue report for language code:dag