The Ayizo languages (Ayizɔ) are
Gbe languages
The Gbe languages (pronounced ) form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widel ...
spoken in
Benin
Benin, officially the Republic of Benin, is a country in West Africa. It was formerly known as Dahomey. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the north-west, and Niger to the north-east. The majority of its po ...
. They are Ayizo,
Kotafon, and
Gbesi.
Distribution
The Ayizo languages are spoken in Benin across and near the
Mono River
The Mono River is the major river of eastern Togo.
Approximately long, and draining a basin of about , it rises between the town of Sokodé and the border with Benin, and flows south. Along the southern portion of the river towards its mouth, i ...
, in the Departments of
Atlantique,
Kouffo,
Mono
Mono may refer to:
Biology
* Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease"
* Monocyte, a type of leukocyte (white blood cell)
* Monodactylidae, members of which are referred to as monos
Technology and computing
* Mono (audio), single-c ...
,
Oueme, and parts of the
Zou Department
Zou is one of the twelve departments of Benin, named for the Zou River which travels through the department before emptying into the Atlantic in the south of the country. The department of Zou was split in two in 1999, with the northern territo ...
.
Classification
The Ayizo languages are classified in the
Phla–Phera languages, a group of the Gbe languages.
The Ayizo languages are:
* Ayizo
*
Kotafon
*
Gbesi
The
Saxwe language was previously classified as an Ayizo language.
Additionally, the Ayizo languages can also be known as the Ayizo–Kotafon–Gbesi languages to distinguish it with the Ayizo language proper.
Orthography
The Ayizo alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the letters
Ɖ/ɖ,
Ɛ/ɛ, and
Ɔ/ɔ, and the
digraphs gb, hw, kp, ny, and xw.
Tone marking
Tones are marked as follows:
*
Acute accent
The acute accent (), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
marks the rising tone: xó, dó
*
Grave accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...
marks the falling tone: ɖò, akpàkpà
*
Caron
A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation.
Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...
marks falling and rising tone: bǔ, bǐ
*
Circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...
accent marks the rising and falling tone: côfù
*
Macron
Macron may refer to:
People
* Emmanuel Macron (born 1977), president of France since 2017
* Brigitte Macron (born 1953), French teacher, wife of Emmanuel Macron
* Jean-Michel Macron (born 1950), French professor of neurology, father of Emmanuel ...
marks the neutral tone: kān
Tones are fully marked in reference books, but not always marked in other writing. The tone marking is phonemic, and the actual pronunciation may be different according to the syllable's environment.
References
Gbe languages
{{VoltaNiger-lang-stub