Jabo language

Kru language of Liberia

The Jabo language is a Kru language spoken by the Jabo people of Liberia. They have also been known in the past as the Gweabo.

Jabo is part of the Grebo language continuum, encoded by Ethnologue more specifically as a dialect of the Southern Grebo language. However, Jabo satisfies the ISO 639 3 criteria for an individual language:
The shared core vocabulary score for Jabo and Seaside Grebo is reported as being as low as 75%. The Jabo and Grebo political territories have been distinct at least since the time of the founding of "Maryland in Africa." The two peoples are currently in different counties (Grand Kru County and Maryland County), and the Jabo claim a greater affinity for the Kru (Krao) than for the Grebo. The physical separation of the Jabo and Grebo areas by the Deeah (Decoris) river is also an effective barrier to social intercourse and commerce. The Jabo and the Grebo have different origin legends, and thus have no shared identity. The Jabo are highly ethnocentric, and consider themselves to be a nation with its own language. and extensively transcribed by his doctoral student George Herzog. Both Sapir and Herzog relied upon the cooperation of Charles G. Blooah as their native informant. Most of the material was recorded on site in Liberia by Herzog, who was primarily a folklorist and ethnomusicologist. His interest in the Jabo language centered on its use in the oral literature of proverbs and sayings, and also in the Jabo drum signalling system. This became focus of the corpus he collected. There is a natural overlap between these areas, since many of the drum signals are formulaic in nature and are based on elements of the oral literature. This may also have entailed that much of the material recorded was originally uttered in a declamatory, rhetorical, or performance style. It has not been established the degree to which such style might depart from more informal styles of Jabo speech. However, this material is the basis of what is presented below.

The metalinguistic import of the Jabo tonemic repertory becomes apparent when the attempt is made to select phonological distinctive features to represent the tonemes, whether binary or n ary features. This in turn has implications for linguistic universals. However, the possibility exists that Sapir's analysis is overdifferentiated (i. e., the transcription is too "narrow" to claim tonemic status). This tonal system implies an extremely high level of significative functional load to borne by pitch in the language. As such it has been cited over the years by a number influential theorists in the phonological field, such as Trubetskoy and others. A similar situation exists in the vowel space postulated by the Sapirean analysis. Since tongue and jaw position, nasalization and pharyngealization are all significative in this model, the vowel space is crowded indeed, with from 19 to 22 possible vowels, not counting diphthongs or long vowels. The emphatic consonants of Jabo were once thought to be an example of the emergence of an implosive consonant series. There currently does not seem to be any evidence to suggest this.

Glebo (Seaside Grebo) had possibly the earliest literary history of any speech variety in the Cape Palmas area, dating to the time of the missionary efforts associated with Maryland in Africa. Nonetheless, Jabo, rather than Glebo, has been proposed by the SIL survey as the basis of a unification orthography or Ausbausprache for the speech varieties of the Southern Grebo group, despite the prestige and precedence of Glebo. This choice may be due to Jabo's preserving a number of "archaic" features from the proto language, if it is indeed the case that its highly differentiated phonology reflects a common stage of development. The pedagogic principle would be that it is easier to teach across heterogeneous groups from a differentiated writing system (to a variety in which the contrast has been merged), than the reverse. Students speaking the less differentiated variety need only learn to ignore the "superfluous" distinctions as heterographic homonyms, rather than memorizing numerous, seemingly random heterophonic homographs.