Languages

Geography and demography

Classification

• Niger-Congo
  • Atlantic
    • Volta-Congo
      • Kwa
        • Left Bank
          • Gbe.
    Many of the Gbe languages are closely related. Based on comparative research, Capo (1988) divides Gbe into five major clusters, where each cluster, far from being a uniform unit, consists of many dialectal varieties. In addition, borders between the clusters are not always distinct. The five major clusters are:
    

    Name	Alternate names	Speakers	Some dialects	Region
    Ewe	Vhe, Ewegbe	ca. 3 000 000	Anlo, Kpando, Ho, Fodome	lower half of Ghana east of the Volta river; southwest Togo
    Gen	Ge, Mina, Gengbe	ca. 400 000	Gliji, Anexo, Agoi	Lake Togo, around Anexo
    Aja	Ajagbe, Adja	ca. 1 300 000	Dogbo, Sikpi	Togo, Aja area along Mono river in the inlands
    Fon	Fongbe, Popo	ca. 1 700 000	Gungbe, Kapse, Agbome, Maxi	southeast Togo, Benin west of the Weme river and along the coast
    Phla-Pherá	Fla, Offra	ca. 400 000	Alada, Toli, Ayizo	Togo and Benin along the coast and around Ahéme lake

    Naming

    The dialect continuum as a whole was called 'Ewe' by Westermann, the most influential writer on the cluster, who used the term 'Standard Ewe' to refer to the written form of the language. Other writers have called the Gbe languages as a whole 'Aja', after the name of the local language of the Aja-Tado area in Benin. However, use of this single language's name for the language cluster as a whole wasn't only not acceptable to all speakers but also rather confusing. Since the establishment of a working group at the West African Languages Congress at Cotonou in 1980, H. B. Capo's name suggestion has been generally accepted: 'Gbe' , which is the word for 'language/dialect' in each of the languages.

    History

    Before 1600

    Ketu, in present day Benin, might be an appropriate starting point for a brief history of the Gbe-speaking peoples. Ewe traditions refer to Ketu as Amedzofe ("origin of humanity") or Mawufe ("home of the Supreme Being"). It is believed that the inhabitants of Ketu originally belonged to the Oyo people of Nigeria and were pressed westward by a series of wars between the tenth and the thirteenth century. In Ketu, the ancestors of the Gbe-speaking peoples separated themselves from other refugees and began to establish their own identity. Yoruba attacks between the thirteenth and the fifteenth century drove a large section of the group still further westward. They settled in the ancient kingdom of Tado (also Stado or Stádó) on the Mono river (in present-day Togo). The Tado kingdom was an important state in West Africa up to the late fifteenth century.
       In the course of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, the Notsie (or Notsé, Notsye, Wancé) kingdom was established by emigrants from the Tado kingdom; Notsie would later (around 1500) become the home of another group of migrants from Tado, the Ewe people. Around 1550, emigrants from Tado established the Allada (or Alada) kingdom, which became the center of the Fon people. Tado is also the origin of the Aja people; in fact, the name Aja-Tado (Adja-Tado) is frequently used to refer to their language.
       Other peoples that speak Gbe languages today are the Gen people (Mina, Ge) around Anexo, who are probably of Ga and Fante origin, and the Phla and Pherá peoples, some of whom consist of the traditional inhabitants of the area intermingled with early migrants from Tado.

    European traders and the transatlantic slave trade

    Little is known of the history of the Gbe languages during the time that only Portuguese, Dutch and Danish traders landed on the Gold Coast (roughly 1500 to 1650). The trade of mostly gold and agricultural goods didn't exercise much influence on social and cultural structures of the time. No need was felt to investigate the indigenous languages and cultures; the languages generally used in trade at this time were Portuguese and Dutch. Some loanwords remain from this period, for example atrapoe 'stairs' from Dutch 'trap' and duku '(piece of) cloth' from Dutch 'doek' or Danish 'dug'. The few written accounts that stem from this period focus on trade. As more European countries established trade posts in the area, missionaries were sent out. As early as 1658, Spanish missionaries translated the Doctrina Christiana into the language of Allada, making it one of the earliest texts in any West African language. The Gbe language used in this document is thought to be a somewhat mangled form of Gen.
       The relatively peaceful situation was profoundly changed with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, which reached its peak in the late eighteenth century when as many as 15 000 slaves per year were exported from the area around Benin as part of a triangular trade between the European mainland, the west coast of Africa and the colonies of the New World (notably the Caribbean). The main actors in this process were Dutch (and to a lesser extent English) traders; captives were supplied mostly by cooperating coastal African states.
       The Bight of Benin, which is precisely the area where the Gbe languages are spoken, was one of the centers of the slave trade at the turn of the eighteenth century. The export of 5 % of the population each year resulted in overall population decline. Moreover, since the majority of the exported captives were male, the slave trade led to imbalance in the female/male ratio. In some parts of the Slave Coast the ratio reached two adult women for every man. Several wars (sometimes deliberately provoked by European powers in order to divide and rule) further distorted social and economical relations in the area. The lack of earlier linguistic data makes it difficult to trace the inevitable linguistic changes that resulted from this turbulent period.

    Colonisation and onwards

    Around 1850, the transatlantic slave trade had virtually ceased. As the grip of European colonial powers strengthened, slave raiding became prohibited, trading focused on goods once more and the Europeans took it to be their calling to Christianize the colonized parts of Africa. In 1847 the Norddeutsche Missions-Gesellschaft (Bremen) started its work in Keta.
       In 1857, the first Ewe grammar, Schlüssel der Ewesprache, dargeboten in den Grammatischen Grundzügen des Anlodialekts, was published by missionary J. B. Schlegel of the Bremen mission. Five different dialects of Gbe (at that time called the Ewé Language-Field) were already distinguished by Schlegel, notes Robert Needham Cust in his Modern Languages of Africa (1883). The dialects listed by Cust don't map exactly onto the five subgroups now distinguished by Capo, which isn't too surprising since Cust himself admits that he relies on a multitude of often conflicting sources. Fon is in fact listed twice (once as 'the dialect of the province of Dahomé' and once as 'Fogbe').
       Where previous literature consisted mostly of travel journals sometimes accompanied by short word lists, Schlegel's work marked the beginning of a period of prolific lexicographic and linguistic research into the various Gbe languages. Important writers of this period include Christaller (Die Volta-Sprachen-Gruppe, 1888), Henrici (Lehrbuch der Ephe-Sprache, 1891, actually the first comparative Gbe grammar), Knüsli (Ewe-German-English Vocabulary, 1892) and Delafosse (Manuel Dahoméen (Fon), 1894).
       In 1902 the missionary Diedrich Hermann Westermann contributed an article titled "Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Yewe-Sprachen in Togo" to Zeitschrift für Afrikanische und Oceanische Sprachen. Westermann was to become one of the most productive and influential writers on the Gbe languages, and his output dominated the Gbe literature and analysis of the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote mainly on the Western Gbe languages, especially on Ewe (though he often used the term 'Ewe' to denote the Gbe dialect continuum as a whole). Among his most important works on Ewe are his A Study of the Ewe language (1930) and Wörterbuch der Ewe-Sprache (1954).

    Renaissance du Gbe

    From 1930 on, publications on various Gbe languages have been appearing rapidly, the vast majority of them dealing with individual Gbe languages. A significant exception is formed by the extensive comparative linguistic research of Hounkpati B.C. Capo, which resulted in an internal classification of the Gbe languages and in a reconstruction of the proto-Gbe phonology. Much of the comparative research for Capo's classification of the Gbe languages was carried out in the 1970s, and partial results were published in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the form of articles on specific phonological developments in various branches of Gbe and, notably, in the form of a unified standard orthography of Gbe. In his Renaissance du Gbe (1988), the internal classification of Gbe was published in full for the first time. In 1991, Capo published a comparative phonology of Gbe. In this period, Capo also initiated Labo Gbe (Int.), the 'Laboratory for research on Gbe languages', based in Benin, which has since fostered research and published several collections of papers on the Gbe languages.
       In the early 1990s, SIL International initiated a study to assess which Gbe communities could benefit from existing literacy efforts and whether additional literacy campaigns in some of the remaining communities would be needed. Synchronised linguistic research carried out in the course of this study shed more light on the relations between the various varieties of Gbe. In general, the SIL studies corroborated many of Capo's findings and led to adjustment of some of his more tentative groupings.

    Linguistic features

    Sounds

    Consonants

    The following phonetic segments are attested in Gbe languages: Capo 1991:39

    Phonetic inventory of consonants in Gbe languages

    bilabial	labio- dental	lamino- dental	lamino- alveolar	apical post- alveolar	alveo- palatal	palatal	labio- palatal	velar	labio- velar	uvular	labialised uvular
    stops and affricates	p   b		t   d	ʦ   ʣ	ɖ	ʧ   ʤ			k   ɡ	k͡p   ɡ͡b
    nasals	m				n		ɲ		ŋ	ŋʷ
    fricatives	ɸ   β	f   v		s   z		ʃ   ʒ					χ   ʁ	χʷ   ʁʷ
    trills					r   r̃
    approximants					l   l̃		j   j̃	ɥ   ɥ̃	ɰ	w   w̃

    Notes
    
  • When symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant except for the trills & approximants rows, where the symbol to the right represents a nasalised consonant.
  • The apico-postalveolar consonants are generally written and transcribed with the symbols for the corresponding alveolar consonants, except for the voiced stop, which uses the symbol for the voiced retroflex stop [ɖ]. This is only to distinguish from the lamino-dental voiced stop, and isn't to be interpreted as the consonant being subapical.
  • The above table lists the attested phonetic segments. Some of the sounds listed here are in free variation with other sounds (for example, r and r̃ with l and l̃). The reader is referred to the individual languages for an overview of their phoneme inventory.

Vowels

Nasality in Gbe

Tone

Morphology

Syntax