Ewe language

Phonology

Consonants

H is a voiced fricative, which has also been described as uvular, , pharyngeal, , or glottal .

is typically alveolar as , but can also be dental as .

The nasal consonants are not distinctive since they appear before only nasal vowels; therefore, Ewe is sometimes said to have no nasal consonants. However, it is more economical to argue that nasal are the underlying form and so are denasalized before oral vowels.

occurs before unrounded (non-back) vowels and before rounded (back) vowels.

Palatalization of alveolar consonants before a high-front vowel occur in the Southern dialect, and are heard as .

Ewe is one of the few languages known to contrast vs. and vs. . The f and v are stronger than in most languages, and , with the upper lip noticeably raised, and thus more distinctive from the rather weak and .

may occur in consonant clusters. It becomes (or ) after coronals.

Vowels

The tilde (˜) marks nasal vowels, though the Peki dialect lacks . Many varieties of Ewe lack one or another of the front mid vowels, and some varieties in Ghana have the additional vowels and .

Ewe does not have a nasal–oral contrast in consonants. It does, however, have a syllabic nasal, which varies as , depending on the following consonant, and carries tone. Some authors treat it as a vowel, with the odd result that Ewe would have more nasal than oral vowels, and one of these vowels has no set place of articulation. If it is taken to be a consonant, there is the odd result of a single nasal consonant that cannot appear before vowels. If nasal consonants are taken to underlie , however, there is no such odd restriction, and the only difference from other consonants is that only nasal stops may be syllabic, a common pattern cross-linguistically.

Tones

Ewe is a tonal language. In a tonal language, pitch differences are used to distinguish one word from another. For example, in Ewe the following three words differ only by tone:

• to ‘ear’ (High tone)
• to ‘report/gossip’(High tone)
• to ‘pound’ (High tone)
• tó 'mountain' (High tone)
• tǒ 'mortar' (Rising tone)
• tò 'buffalo' (Low tone)

Phonetically, there are three tone registers, High, Mid, and Low, and three rising and falling contour tones. However, most Ewe dialects have only two distinctive registers, High and Mid. These are depressed in nouns after voiced obstruents: High becomes Mid (or Rising), and Mid becomes Low. Mid is also realized as Low at the end of a phrase or utterance, as in the example 'buffalo' above.

In writing, tones are marked by acute accent, grave accent, caron, and circumflex. They may be used along with the tilde that marks nasal vowels.

Pragmatics

Ewe has phrases of overt politeness, such as meɖekuku (meaning "please") and akpe (meaning "thank you").

Orthography

The African Reference Alphabet is used when Ewe is represented orthographically, so the written version is somewhat like a combination of the Latin alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet.

An "n" is placed after vowels to mark nasalization. Tone is generally unmarked, except in some common cases, which require disambiguation: the first person plural pronoun mí 'we' is marked high to distinguish it from the second person plural mi 'you', and the second person singular pronoun wò 'you' is marked low to distinguish it from the third person plural pronoun wó 'they/them'

• ekpɔ wò — 'he saw you'
• ekpɔ wo — 'he saw them'

Naming system

The Ewe use a system of giving a first name to a child based on the day of the week the child was born. This arises from the belief that a child's real name can be determined only after the child has shown its character. However, since a child is a person, not an object, the child must be referred to by some name in the interim, and so a name is provided based on the day of birth. A final name is given at a naming ceremony, seven days after the date of birth.

As a matter of pride in their heritage, especially since the 1970s, many educated Ewe, who were given Western names, have dropped those names formally/legally or informally and use their birthday name as their official name.

The Ewe birthday-naming system is as follows:

Often, people are called by their birthday name most of the time; the given name being used only on formal documents. In such cases, children with the same birth name are delineated by suffixes: -gã, meaning "big", and -vi, meaning "little". For example, after the birth of another Kofi, the first child called Kofi becomes Kofigã, and the new child Kofi. A subsequent Kofi, would be Kofivi, or Kofitse, mostly among Wedome and Tɔngu Ewes. Sometimes, the renaming happens twice, as the second Kofi might have originally been called Kofivi, while the eldest retained Kofi, thereby necessitating that they both be renamed on the birth of a third Kofi.

Grammar

Ewe is a subject–verb–object language. The possessive precedes the head noun. Adjectives, numerals, demonstratives and relative clauses follow the head noun. Ewe also has postpositions rather than prepositions.

Ewe is well known as a language having logophoric pronouns. Such pronouns are used to refer to the source of a reported statement or thought in indirect discourse, and can disambiguate sentences that are ambiguous in most other languages. The following examples illustrate:

• Kofi be e-dzo 'Kofi said he left' (he ≠ Kofi)
• Kofi be yè-dzo 'Kofi said he left' (he = Kofi)

In the second sentence, yè is the logophoric pronoun.

Ewe also has a rich system of serial verb constructions.

There are also said to be tenses by Warburton (et al. 1968), though most linguists stated that Ewe is an "aspect-prominent language".

Negation in Ewe, according to Agbedor (1994), uses a pattern that attaches a me- prefix to the verb while simultaneously adding a stand-alone o at the end of the sentence, akin to French negation.

• Kofi de suku. (K. go school)

'Kofi went to school.'

• Kofi mede suku o. (K. NEG-go school NEG)

'Kofi did not go to school.'

Status

Ewe is a national language in Togo. It is also a government-backed regional language in Ghana.

Literature

Scholars have identified The Tragedy of Agbezuge (Amegbetɔa alo Agbezuge ƒe Ŋutinya) by Sam J. Obianim as the first novel written in Ewe.

The Fifth landing stage by Ferdinand Kwasi Fiawoo, a play depicting a part of the history of the Ewe people, is a notable literary work as well.