Солтүстік Гананың Дагбани тілі

Gur language of Northern Ghana

Dagbani (or Dagbane), also known as Dagbanli or Dagbanle, is a Gur language spoken in Ghana and Northern Togo. Its native speakers are estimated around 1,170,000. In Togo, Dagbani is spoken in the Savanes Region on the border with Ghana.

Dagbani has a major dialect split between Eastern Dagbani (Nayahali), centred on the traditional capital town of Yendi (Naya), and Western Dagbani (Tomosili), 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. The words Dagbani and Dagbanli given above for the name of the language are respectively the Eastern and Western dialect forms of the name, but the Dagbani Orthography Committee resolved that “It was decided that in the spelling system <Dagbani> is used to refer to the Language, and <Dagbanli> to the life and culture”; in the spoken language, each dialect uses its form of the name for both functions.

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

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 a Dagomba scholar, Ibrahim Mahama. According to the linguist Salifu Nantogma Alhassan, there is evidence to suggest that there are gender related double standards in the Dagbani language with "more labels that trivialise females than males". Meanwhile, the data was electronically compiled by John Miller Chernoff and Roger Blench (whose version is published online), and converted into a database by Tony Naden, on the basis of which a full featured dictionary is ongoing and can be viewed online.

Each set of personal pronouns in Dagbani is distinguished regarding person, number and animacy. Besides the distinction between singular and plural, there is an additional distinction between [+/ animate] in the 3rd person. Moreover, Dagbani 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.

Dagbani distinguishes not only between singular and plural for indefinite pronouns, but also between [+/ animate]. Therefore, there are two pairs of indefinite pronouns. Indefinites are basically used in the same way as adjectives, as their morphological form is similar to that of nouns and adjectives.

In Dagbani, the question word can either appear in situ or ex situ.