Ga is a
Kwa language
The Kwa languages, often specified as New Kwa, are a proposed but as-yet-undemonstrated family of languages spoken in the south-eastern part of Ivory Coast, across southern Ghana, and in central Togo. The name was introduced 1895 by Gottlob Kr ...
spoken in
Ghana
Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...
, in and around the capital
Accra. There are also some speakers in
Togo
Togo (), officially the Togolese Republic (french: République togolaise), is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, where its c ...
,
Benin
Benin ( , ; french: Bénin , ff, Benen), officially the Republic of Benin (french: République du Bénin), and formerly Dahomey, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the nort ...
and Western
Nigeria
Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...
. It has a phonemic distinction between three vowel lengths.
Classification
Ga is a
Kwa language, part of the
Niger–Congo family. It is very closely related to
Adangme, and together they form the
Ga–Dangme branch within Kwa.
Ga is the predominant language of the
Ga people, an ethnic group of Ghana. Ethnic Ga family names (surnames) include Owoo, Lartey, Nortey, Aryee, Poku, Lamptey, Tetteh, Ankrah, Tetteyfio, Laryea, Ayitey, Okine, Bortey, Quarshie, Quaye, Quaynor, Ashong, Kotei, Clottey, Nai, Sowah, Odoi, Maale, Ako, Adjetey, Annang, Addo, Yemoh, Abbey and Adjei.
Geographic distribution
Ga is spoken in south-eastern
Ghana
Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...
, in and around the capital
Accra. It has relatively little dialectal variation. Although English is the official language of Ghana, Ga is one of 16 languages in which the ''Bureau of Ghana Languages'' publishes material.
Phonology
Consonants
Ga has 31 consonant phonemes.
* is an allophone of which occurs before nasals and is represented with its own digraph in writing.
* may be realised as when between a consonant and vowel
* has an allophone before nasal vowels
Vowels
Ga has seven oral vowels and five nasal vowels. All of the vowels have three different
vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, ...
s: short, long or extra long (the latter appears only in the simple future and the simple past negative forms).
Tones
Ga has two tones, high and low. Like many West African languages, it has
tone terracing.
Phonotactics
The syllable structure of Ga is , where the second phoneme of an initial consonant cluster can only be and a final consonant may only be a (short or long) nasal consonant, e.g. ''ekome'', "one", V-CV-CV; ''kakadaŋŋ'', "long", CV-CV-CVC; ''mli'', "inside", CCV. Ga syllables may also consist solely of a syllabic nasal, for example in the first syllable of ''ŋshɔ'', "sea".
Writing system
Ga was first written in about 1764, by
Christian Jacob Protten (1715–1769), who was the son of a Danish soldier and a Ga woman.
Protten was a
Gold Coast Euro-African Moravian missionary and educator in the eighteenth century. In the mid-1800s, the Germany missionary,
Johannes Zimmermann
Johannes Zimmermann (2 March 1825 – 13 December 1876) was a missionary, clergyman, translator, philologist and ethnolinguist of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Switzerland, who translated the entire Bible into the Ga language of ...
(1825–1876), assisted by the Gold Coast historian,
Carl Christian Reindorf (1834–1917) and others, worked extensively on the grammar of the language, published a dictionary and translated the entire Bible into the Ga language.
The orthography has been revised a number of times since 1968, with the most recent review in 1990.
The writing system is a
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
-based
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
and has 26 letters. It has three additional letter symbols which correspond to the
IPA symbols. There are also eleven digraphs and two trigraphs. Vowel length is represented by doubling or tripling the vowel symbol, e.g. 'a', 'aa' and 'aaa'. Tones are not represented. Nasalisation is represented after
oral consonant
An oral consonant is a consonant sound in speech that is made by allowing air to escape from the mouth, as opposed to the nose, as in a nasal consonant. To create an intended oral consonant sound, the entire mouth plays a role in modifying the air ...
s where it distinguishes between
minimal pairs.
The Ga alphabet is:
Aa, Bb, Dd, Ee, Ɛɛ, Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, Ŋŋ, Oo, Ɔɔ, Pp, Rr, Ss, Tt, Uu, Vv, Ww, Yy, Zz
The following letters represent sounds which do not correspond with the same letter as the
IPA symbol (e.g. B represents ):
*J j -
*Y y -
Digraphs and trigraphs:
*Gb gb -
*Gw gw -
*Hw hw -
*Jw jw -
*Kp kp -
*Kw kw -
*Ny ny -
*Ŋm ŋm -
*Ŋw ŋw - (an allophone rather than a phoneme)
*Sh sh -
*Ts ts -
*Shw shw -
*Tsw tsw -
See also
*
Ga people
*
Languages of Ghana
Ghana is a multilingual country in which about eighty languages are spoken. Of these, English, which was inherited from the colonial era, is the official language and lingua franca. Of the languages indigenous to Ghana, Akan is the most widely s ...
*
Christian Jacob Protten
*
Carl Christian Reindorf
*
Johannes Zimmermann
Johannes Zimmermann (2 March 1825 – 13 December 1876) was a missionary, clergyman, translator, philologist and ethnolinguist of the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society of Switzerland, who translated the entire Bible into the Ga language of ...
Footnotes
References
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
External links
My First GaDangme Dictionarykasahorow
Short tutorial on counting in the Ga languageYoung boy speaking about Ghanaian tribes in Ga language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ga Language
Ga–Dangme languages
Languages of Ghana