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Information about Ewe Language

Ewe (Eʋegbe)
Spoken in:Ghana, Togo
Region:Southeast corner of Ghana, southern Togo
Total speakers:2.5 million, 3 million including second language speakers
Ranking:
Genetic classification:
Official status
Official language of:
Regulated by:
Language codes
ISO 639-1ee
ISO 639-2ewe
SIL
See also: Language – List of languages


Ewe (native name: Eʋegbe) is a Kwa language spoken in Ghana and Togo by approximately three million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, stretching from eastern Ghana to western Nigeria. Other Gbe languages include Fon and Aja. Like other Gbe languages, Ewe is a tonal language.

The German Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann published many dictionaries and grammars of Ewe and several other Gbe languages. Other linguists that have worked on Ewe include Gilbert Ansre (tone, syntax), Hounkpati B. Capo (phonology, phonetics), Herbert Stahlke (morphology, tone), Roberto Pazzi (anthropology, lexicography), Felix K. Ameka (semantics, cognitive linguistics) and Alan Stewart Duthie (semantics, phonetics).

Sounds

Consonants

Bilabial Labiodental Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Labial-velar Glottal
Plosive pbtdɖkɡk͡pmi 'you', and the second person singular pronoun wò 'you' is marked low to distinguish it from the third person plural pronoun wo 'they/them'
  • ekpɔ wò [ɛ́k͡pɔ̀ wɔ̀] — 'he saw you'
  • ekpɔ wo [ɛ́k͡pɔ̀ wɔ́] — 'he saw them'

Status

Ewe is a national language in Togo and Ghana.

References

  • 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.
  • 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


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This is a list of languages, ordered by the number of native-language speakers, with some data for second-language use. Languages are listed for secondary locations only when spoken by more than 1% of the population.
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A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language. As with biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics.
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This is a list of bodies that regulate standard languages.

Afrikaans Die Taalkommissie, South Africa
Arabic Academy of the Arabic Language (مجمع اللغة العربية, Syria, Egypt, Jordan,
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ISO 639 is the set of international standards that lists short codes for language names.

ISO 639 consists of different parts, of which two parts have been approved and a third part that is in the final approval (FDIS) stage. The other parts are works in progress.
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Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics), a Christian linguistic service organization which studies lesser-known languages primarily to provide the speakers with Bibles in
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See Language (journal) for the linguistics journal.


A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
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lists of languages:
  • List of languages by name
  • List of languages by writing system
  • List of languages by number of native speakers
  • Ethnologue list of most spoken languages

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Kwa languages are spoken in the south-eastern part of Côte d'Ivoire, in Ghana, Togo and Benin, and the southwestern corner of Nigeria. The term was introduced 1885 by Krause and used by Westermann (1952) and Greenberg (1963).
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TOGO was a Japanese roller coaster design company, famous for inventing the stand-up roller coaster. TOGO went bankrupt in the early 2000s due to a lawsuit by Knott's Berry Farm for problems with their Windjammer roller coaster.
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Gbe languages (pronounced [g͡be])[1] form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria.
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Motto
"Unity and Faith, Peace and Progress"
Anthem
"Arise O Compatriots, Nigeria's Call Obey"


Capital Abuja

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Fon (native name Fɔngbè) is part of the Gbe language cluster and belongs to the Kwa sub-family of the Niger-Congo languages. Fon is spoken mainly in Benin by approximately 1.7 million speakers.
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There are two languages called Aja:
  • Aja language (Niger-Congo), spoken in Benin and Togo
  • Aja language (Nilo-Saharan), spoken in Sudan

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A Tonal language is a language that uses tone to distinguish words. Tone is a phonological trait common to many languages around the world (though rare in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Pacific). Chinese is perhaps the most well-known of such languages.
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Diedrich Hermann Westermann (June 24, 1875–May 31, 1956) was a German missionary, Africanist, and linguist. He substantially extended and revised the work of Carl Meinhof, his teacher, although he rejected some of Meinhof's theories only implicitly.
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In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are:

IPA Description Example
Language Orthography IPA Meaning
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In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth. The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

IPA Description Example
Language Orthography IPA Meaning

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Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the superior teeth.
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In phonetics, retroflex consonants are consonant sounds used in some languages. (They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in indology.
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Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex.
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Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).
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Labial-velar consonants are doubly articulated at the velum and the lips. They are sometimes called "labiovelar consonants", a term which can also refer to labialized velars, such as the approximant [w].
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Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricatives, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider them to be
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stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. The terms plosive and stop are usually used interchangeably, but they are not perfect synonyms.
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Affricate consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as [t] or [d]) but release as a fricative (such as [s]
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nasal consonant is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is
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Fricatives (or spirants) are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These are the lower lip against the upper teeth in the case of [f]
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