Wobé (Ouobe) is a
Kru language
The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast.
Classification
According to Güldemann (2018), Kru lacks sufficient lexical resemblances and noun class resemblances to conclude a relation ...
spoken in
Ivory Coast
Ivory Coast, also known as Côte d'Ivoire, officially the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, is a country on the southern coast of West Africa. Its capital is Yamoussoukro, in the centre of the country, while its largest city and economic centre is ...
. It is one of several languages in a
dialect continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...
called ''Wèè (Wɛɛ)''.
Tone
Wobé is known for claims that it has the largest number of
tones (fourteen) of any language in the world.
However, this has not been confirmed by other researchers, many of whom believe that some of these will turn out to be sequences of tones or prosodic effects,
[Newman believes Singler is a valuable counterweight to Bearth & Link, but does not accept all his criticism; he accept the Wobe 43 toneme, for example, but believes it should be analyzed as /32/ (all tones being off by 1 compared to related dialects).] though the Wèè languages in general do have extraordinarily large tone systems.
The fourteen posited tones are:
Numerals
Wobe has a quinary, decimal system, and it is one of the only two Kru languages which have adopted the decimal system.
[Hofer, Verena]
Numerals in Wobé language
References
Languages of Ivory Coast
Wee languages
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