Gokana (Gòkánà) is an
Ogoni language
The Ogoni languages, or Kegboid languages, are the five languages of the Ogoni people of Rivers State, Nigeria.
They fall into two clusters, East and West, with a limited degree of mutual intelligibility between members of each cluster. The Ogon ...
spoken by some 130,000 people in
Rivers State,
Nigeria.
Phonology
Gokana has been argued to lack
syllables
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
, a radical claim because syllables are traditionally considered to be
universal. According to Hyman (1983), Gokana "does not organise its consonants and vowels into syllables." Hyman later amended his claim to say that "the syllable plays at best a minor role in the
prosodic organisation of Gokana" and is perhaps not activated to express any generalisations in the language.
Writing system
Nasal vowels are indicated by a tilde and
tones are indicated by an acute or grave accent:
* The high tone is indicated by an acute accent : á, ã́, é, ẹ́, ẽ́, í, ĩ́, ó, ọ́, ṍ, ú, ṹ, ḿ ;
* The low tone is indicated by a grave accent : à, ã̀, è, ẹ̀, ẽ̀, ì, ĩ̀, ò, ọ̀, õ̀, ù, ũ̀, m̀ ;
* The middle tone is indicated with no diacritic.
References
"A global linguistic database:Gokana" Tower of Babel Project*Brosnahan, L. F. (1964)
Outlines of the Phonology of the Gokana Dialect of Ogoni ''Journal of West African Languages'' 1(1): pp. 43–48
*Brosnahan, L. F. (1967) "A Word List of the Gokana Dialect of Ogoni" ''Journal of West African Languages'' 4(2): pp. 43–52
*
Hyman, Larry M. and
Comrie, B. (1981) "Logophoric Reference in Gokana" ''Journal of African Languages and Linguistics'' (Leiden) 3(1): pp. 19–37
*Hyman, Larry M. (1982) "The representation of nasality in Gokana" ''In'' Hulst, Harry, van der and Smith, Norval (eds.) (1982) ''The Structure of Phonological Representations'' part, 1 Foris Publishing, Dordrecht, Holland,
*Yan Huang (2003)
Switch-reference in Amele and logophoric verbal suffix in Gokana: a generalized neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis ''In'' Georgiafentis, M.; Haeberli, E, and Varlokosta, S. (eds.) (2003) ''Reading Working Papers in Linguistics'' Volume 7, pp. 53–76, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, University of Reading, Reading, UK
*Bond, Oliver and Anderson, Gregory D. S. (2005) "Divergent Structure in Ogonoid Languages" ''In'' (2005) ''Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistic Society'' Volume 31, Berkeley Linguistic Society, Berkeley, California
Indigenous languages of Rivers State
Ogoni languages
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