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Ewe language
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Ewe (name used by native speakers: Ewegbe, ) is a Niger-Congo language spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin by over three million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, spoken in southeastern Ghana and southern Togo. Other Gbe languages include Fon and Aja. Like other Gbe languages, Ewe is a tone language.
The German Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann published many dictionaries and grammars of Ewe and several other Gbe languages.
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Encyclopedia
Ewe (name used by native speakers: Ewegbe, ) is a Niger-Congo language spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin by over three million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, spoken in southeastern Ghana and southern Togo. Other Gbe languages include Fon and Aja. Like other Gbe languages, Ewe is a tone language.
The German Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann published many dictionaries and grammars of Ewe and several other Gbe languages. Other linguists who have worked on Ewe and closely related languages include Gilbert Ansre (tone, syntax), Herbert Stahlke (morphology, tone), Nick Clements (tone, syntax), Roberto Pazzi (anthropology, lexicography), Felix K. Ameka (semantics, cognitive linguistics), Alan Stewart Duthie (semantics, phonetics), Hounkpati B. Capo (phonology, phonetics), Enoch Aboh (syntax), and Chris Collins (syntax).
Sounds
Consonants
The consonant shown in the left column under each place of articulation is voiceless, and the one shown in the right column is voiced. [?] is a voiced fricative which has also been described as uvular or pharyngeal.
The nasal consonants [m, n, ?, ?] do not have phonemic status, as they are predictable variants of oral consonants in the context of nasal vowels.
Ewe is one of the few languages known to contrast [f] vs [?] and [v] vs [ß], which are typically considered allophones in other languages.
Vowels
The tilde (~) marks nasal vowels. Many varieties of Ewe lack one or another of the front mid vowels, and some varieties of Ewe spoken in Ghana have the additional vowels /?/ and /?~/
Tones
Ewe is a tone language. In a tone language, pitch differences are used to distinguish one word from another. For example, in Ewe the following three words differ only in their tones:
tó 'mountain' (High tone)
to 'mortar' (Rising tone)
tò 'buffalo' (Low tone)
Most varieties of Ewe have two distinctive level tones, High and Mid, the latter being realized as Low at the end of a phrase or utterance, as in the example 'buffalo' above. Ewe also has rising and falling tones composed of sequences of High, Mid, and Low tones. A striking feature of the Ewe tone system is the presence of what have been called "depressor consonants": after any voiced plosive, affricate or fricative at the beginning of a noun, High tones are realized as Rising tones, and Mid tones as Low tones.
Writing system
Ewe is written in the African reference alphabet, which is the Latin alphabet with some extra letters, some of which are derived from the International Phonetic Alphabet, added to represent certain sounds.
| A a | B b | D d | | Dz dz | E e | | F f | | G g | Gb gb | |
|---|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | H h | I i | K k | Kp kp | L l | M m | N n | Ny ny | ? ? | O o | | P p |
|---|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | R r | S s | T t | Ts ts | U u | V v | | W w | X x | Y y | Z z |
|---|
| | | | | | | | | | |
An n is placed after vowels to mark nasalization. Tone is generally unmarked, except in some common cases which require disambiguation, e.g. the first person plural pronoun mí 'we' is marked high to distinguish it from the second person plural mi 'you', and the second person singular pronoun wò 'you' is marked low to distinguish it from the third person plural pronoun wo 'they/them'
— 'he saw you'
— 'he saw them'
Grammar
Ewe is a Subject Verb Object language. The possessor precedes the head noun. Adjectives, numerals, demonstratives and relative clauses follow the head noun.
Ewe is well known as a language having logophoric pronouns. Such pronouns are used to refer to the source of a reported statement or thought in indirect discourse, and can disambiguate sentences that are ambiguous in most other languages. The following examples illustrate:
Kofi be e-dzo 'Kofi said he left' (he ? Kofi)
Kofi be yè-dzo 'Kofi said he left' (he = Kofi)
In the second sentence, yè is the logophoric pronoun.
Ewe also has a rich system of serial verb constructions.
Status
Ewe is a national language in Togo and Ghana.
Bibliography
- Ansre, Gilbert (1961) The Tonal Structure of Ewe. MA Thesis, Kennedy School of Missions of Hartford Seminary Foundation.
- Ameka, Felix Kofi (2001) 'Ewe'. In Garry and Rubino (eds.), Fact About the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages, Past and Present, 207-213. New York/Dublin: The H.W. Wilson Company.
- Clements, George N. (1975) 'The logophoric pronoun in Ewe: Its role in discourse', Journal of West African Languages 10(2): 141-177
- Collins, Chris. (1993) Topics in Ewe Syntax. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT.
- Capo, Hounkpati B.C. (1991) A Comparative Phonology of Gbe, Publications in African Languages and Linguistics, 14. Berlin/New York: Foris Publications & Garome, Bénin: Labo Gbe (Int).
- Pasch, Helma (1995) Kurzgrammatik des Ewe Köln: Köppe.
- Westermann, Diedrich Hermann (1930) A Study of the Ewe Language London: Oxford University Press.
External links
- Institut für Afrikanistik der Universität zu Köln
- at Verba Africana
- at UCLA
- page at Omniglot
- at GhanaKeyboards.Com
- Recordings of Ewe being spoken.
- Online Gbe(Ewe)-English Glossary
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