Dagbanli language

Dagbanli, also known as Dagbani, is a Gur language spoken in Ghana and northern Togo. It has an estimated 1.17 million native speakers. Dagbanli is the most widely spoken language in the northern half of Ghana, including among several acephalous ethnic groups historically under the authority of the King of Dagbaŋ, the Yaa-Naa. Dagbaŋ, located in the Northern Region of Ghana, is regarded as the oldest traditional kingdom in the country, and the Yaa-Naa serves as its paramount chief, presiding over the various communities within the Dagbaŋ area.
Dagbanli is mutually intelligible with Mampruli and closely related to Nabit, Talni, Kamara, Kantosi, and Hanga, also spoken in Northern, North East, Upper East, and Savannah Regions. It is also related to the other members of the same subgroup spoken in other regions, including Dagaare and Wali, spoken in Upper West Region of Ghana, along with Frafra and Kusaal, spoken in the Upper East Region of the country.
In Togo, Dagbanli is spoken in the Savanes Region on the border with Ghana.

Etymology and naming

The language is known as Dagbanli, following the internal naming system in which Dagbamba refers to the people, Dagbanli to the language, and Dagbaŋ to the land. Linguists note that this ‑li marker for languages is consistent across Mabia languages.
The form Dagbani became widespread during the colonial and missionary period, when British administrators and early linguists standardized language names according to English spelling conventions and often derived them from anglicized ethnonyms such as “Dagomba.” These spellings were blindly adopted in early dictionaries, primers, and later by the Ghanaian education system and the Bureau of Ghana Languages.
Contemporary scholars, including Dr. Fatimata Wunpini Mohammed, argue that Dagbanli is the culturally and linguistically appropriate name, and that the continued use of Dagbani reflects colonial-era naming practices. She describes the use of Dagbanli in academic and community contexts as part of ongoing efforts toward linguistic decolonization.

Dialects

Dagbanli has a major dialect split between Eastern Dagbanli, centred on the traditional capital town of Yendi, and Western Dagbanli, centred on the administrative capital of the Northern Region, Tamale. The dialects are, however, mutually intelligible, and mainly consist of different root vowels in some lexemes, and different forms or pronunciations of some nouns, particularly those referring to local flora.

Phonology

Vowels

Dagbanli has eleven phonemic vowels – six short vowels and five long vowels:

	Front	Central	Back
High
Mid
Low

	Front	Central	Back
High
Mid
Low

Olawsky puts the schwa in place of, unlike other researchers on the language who use the higher articulated. Allophonic variation based on tongue-root advancement is well attested for 4 of these vowels: ~, ~, ~ and ~.

Consonants

mainly occurs phonemically among other Western dialects.
debuccalizes as a glottal when in intervocalic position. debuccalizes as a glottal stop post-vocalic position.
Sounds are realized as when preceding front vowels.
can be heard as when in post-vocalic positions.
Tone

Dagbanli is a tonal language in which pitch is used to distinguish words, as in gballi 'grave' vs. gballi 'zana mat'. The tone system of Dagbani is characterised by two-level tones and downstep.

Orthography

Dagbanli was first written in Ajami script. In contemporary times it is mostly written in a Latin alphabet with the addition of the apostrophe, the letters ɛ, ɣ, ŋ, ɔ, and ʒ, and the digraphs ch, gb, kp, ŋm, sh and ny. The literacy rate used to be only 2–3%. This percentage is expected to rise as Dagbanli is now a compulsory subject in primary and junior secondary school all over Dagbaŋ. The orthography currently used represents a number of allophonic distinctions. Tone is not marked.

ŋm

’

Grammar

Dagbanli is agglutinative, but with some fusion of affixes. The constituent order in Dagbanli sentences is usually agent–verb–object.

Lexicon

There is insight into a historical stage of the language in the papers of Rudolf Fisch, reflecting data collected during his missionary work in the German Togoland colony in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially the lexical list, though there is also some grammatical information and sample texts. A more modern glossary was published in 1934 by a southern Ghanaian officer of the colonial government, E. Foster Tamakloe, in 1934, with a revised edition by British officer Harold Blair. Various editors added to the wordlist and a more complete publication was produced in 2003 by an indigenopus scholar, Ibrahim Mahama. Meanwhile, the data was electronically compiled by John Miller Chernoff and Roger Blench, and converted into a database by Tony Naden, on the basis of which a full-featured dictionary is ongoing and can be viewed online.

Noun class system

Pronouns

Each set of personal pronouns in Dagbanli is distinguished regarding person, number and animacy. Besides the distinction between singular and plural, there is an additional distinction between in the 3rd person. Moreover, Dagbanli distinguishes between emphatic and non-emphatic pronouns and there are no gender distinctions. While there is no morphological differentiation between grammatical cases, pronouns can occur in different forms according to whether they appear pre- or postverbally.

Non-emphatic pronouns

Preverbal

Preverbal pronouns serve as subjects of a verb and are all monosyllabic.

Person	SG	PL
1	n	ti
2	a	yi
3	o	bɛ
3	di	di, ŋa

Postverbal

Postverbal pronouns usually denote objects.

Person	SG	PL
1	ma	ti
2	a	ya
3	o	ba
3	li	li, ŋa

Given the fact that preverbal and postverbal pronouns do not denote two complementary sets, one could refer to them as unmarked or specifically marked for postverbal occurrence.

Person	SG			PL
	Unmarked		Marked	Unmarked		Marked
1	n		ma		ti
2		a		yi		ya
3		o		bɛ		ba
3	di		li	di		li

Emphatic pronouns

Emphatic pronouns in Dagbanli serve as regular pronouns in that they can stand in isolation, preverbally or postverbally.

Person	SG	PL
1	mani	tinima
2	nyini	yinima
3	ŋuni, ŋuna	bɛna, bana
3	dini, dina	ŋana

Reciprocal pronouns

Reciprocals are formed by the addition of the word taba after the verb.

Reflexive pronouns

Reflexive pronouns are formed by the suffix -maŋa, which is attached to the non-emphatic preverbal pronoun.
The affix maŋa can also occur as an emphatic pronoun after nouns.

Possessive pronouns

The possessive pronouns in Dagbanli exactly correspond to the preverbal non-emphatic pronouns, which always precede the possessed constituent.

Relative pronouns

In Dagbanli the relative pronouns are ŋʊn and ni.
The relative pronouns in Dagbanli are not obligatory present and can also be absent depending on the context, as the following example illustrates.
Relative pronouns in Dagbanli can also be complex in their nature, such that they consist of two elements, an indefinite pronoun and an emphatic pronoun.

Interrogative pronouns

Source:
Interrogative pronouns in Dagbanli make a distinction between human and non-human.

Dagbanli	English
bòn / bà	what
ŋùní	who
bòzùɤù	why
yà	where
díní	which
álá	how much
bòndàlì	when
sáhá díní	when
wùlà	how

Additionally, interrogative pronouns inflect for number, but not all of them. Those inflecting for number belong to the semantic categories , , .

Semantic Category	SG	PL	Gloss
	ŋùní	bànímà	who/whom
	dìní	dìnnímà	which
	bò	bònímà	what

Demonstrative pronouns

Demonstrative pronouns in Dagbanli make a morphological difference between the singular and plural form. The demonstrative pronoun ŋɔ moves to the specifier of the functional NumP and if Num is plural, then the plural morphem -nímá attaches to the demonstrative pronoun. If Num is singular, there is a zero morphem, such that the demonstrative pronoun does not differ in its morphological form.

Demonstrative Pronoun	SG	PL	Gloss
Proximal	ŋɔ	ŋɔnímá	this/these
Distal	ŋɔ há	ŋɔnímá há	that/those