Ega, also known as Egwa and Diès, is a West African language spoken in south-central

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 i ...

. It is of uncertain affiliation and has variously been classified as Kwa or an independent branch of Niger-Congo.

Demographics

Ega is spoken in 21 villages near Gly in Diès Canton, Gôh-Djiboua District,

(Bole-Richard 1983: 359). Some villages are Broudougou, Gly, Dairo, Didizo, and Douzaroko. The Ega people are increasing in number, though some are shifting to

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through intermarriage.

Documentation

A language documentation fieldwork project on Ega was conducted by a team from Universität Bielefeld, Germany (Dafydd Gibbon) and Université Houphouet Boigny, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire (Firmin Ahoua) from 2000 to 2003 in cooperation with York University, Canada (Bruce Connell).Gibbon, Dafydd and Bow, Catherine and Bird, Steven and Hughes, Baden. 2004. Securing interpretability: the case of Ega language documentation. P''roceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation'', LREC 2004, Evaluation and Language resources Distribution Agency (ELRA). pp.1369-1372.

Classification

Ega is possibly a divergent Western Kwa language within the Niger–Congo language family spoken in

. It does not appear to belong to any of the traditional branches of Niger–Congo. Though traditionally assumed to be one of the

Kwa languages 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 ...

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(2004) conservatively classified it as a separate branch of the Atlantic–Congo family, pending a demonstration that it is actually related to the Kwa or

Volta–Niger languages The Volta–Niger family of languages, also known as West Benue–Congo or East Kwa, is one of the branches of the Niger–Congo language family, with perhaps 70 million speakers. Among these are the most important languages of southern Nigeria ...

. However, Blench (2017) classified Ega as a fully Western Kwa language that has borrowed from

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, Gur, and Mande.Blench, Roger. 2017.
The Ega language of Cote d'Ivoire: how can it be classified?
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Cultural and economic context

Like other Western Kwa languages, traditional story-telling among the Ega people has a fairly strict schedule: after an introduction by the narrator, a well-defined role in the village, the narration proceeds, punctuated by responder's interjection ɛsɛ and interspersed with song interludes with the call and response structure of work songs. The economy of the Ega community is partly horticultural, partly dependent on plantation work. Hunting is practised with nets which are used to enclose an area of several hundred square meters, within which small game such as agouti (''Thryonomys swinderianus'') are cornered by a group of beaters. The nets resemble the local canoe trawling nets used on the southern Côte d'Ivoire coast about 100km further south, and possibly indicate a history of coastal migration.

Phonology

Ega has twenty-seven consonants. Its stops have a three-way contrast between voiceless, voiced, and implosive. There are nine vowels, with ATR contrast: /i̙/, /i̘/, /u̙/, /u̘/, /e̙/, /e̘/, /o̙/, /o̘/, and /a/. There are three tones: high, mid, and low.

References

*Blench, Roger. 2004
The Ega Language of Côte d'Ivoire: Etymologies and Implications for Classification
{{Niger-Congo branches Niger–Congo languages Languages of Ivory Coast