Grebo is a
dialect cluster
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 vari ...
of the
Kru languages
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 relatio ...
, spoken by the
Grebo people of present-day
Liberia
Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to its northwest, Guinea to its north, Ivory Coast to its east, and the Atlantic Ocean to its south and southwest. It ...
and the
Krumen of
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 ...
in West Africa.
Definition
The first African tribal group contacted by European explorers and Americo-Liberian colonists reaching the area of
Cape Palmas were the Seaside Grebo, or Glebo.
[Classified as a dialect of Southern Grebo by ]ISO 639-3
ISO 639-3:2007, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages'', is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for ...
. The colonists came to refer to their language as ''Grebo''. In the absence of other qualification, the term ''Grebo language'' refers to the ''Glebo'' speech variety.
Considerable ambiguity and imprecision continue to exist with respect to the scholarly use of the term Grebo; it is not always clear precisely which variety it is intended to denote. If it is being used as a group term, it is not always clear what is to be included in the group. This imprecision results from several factors:
*The incompleteness of the data;
*Lack of rigor in the classification methodology; and
*The speech area involved is a
language continuum.
''Ethnologue'' classification
''Ethnologue'' subdivides the Grebo branch of Western Kru into nine coded languages based on the needs of literacy, several consisting of divergent dialects with strong ethnocentric identities.
*
Glio-Oubi
*
Krumen (3 languages in Côte d'Ivoire)
*
Grebo proper (5 languages)
Any of the twenty-five or more dialects in the group is likely to be called (a variety of) ''Grebo.''
Multilingualism
A degree of
bilingualism /
bidialectalism is normal in such a context, but so is the commonly observed thrust for autonomy. Factors such as
exogamy
Exogamy is the social norm of marrying outside one's social group. The group defines the scope and extent of exogamy, and the rules and enforcement mechanisms that ensure its continuity. One form of exogamy is dual exogamy, in which two groups ...
and the needs of commerce foster intercommunication strategies. Because of the emphasis on the need for communication, the degree of inter-intelligibility of the varieties appears to be less than if they were considered in isolation.
Diglossia
In linguistics, diglossia () is a situation in which two dialects or languages are used (in fairly strict compartmentalization) by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety (labeled " ...
(extended or not), often with Liberian (Pidgin) English, provides an additional dimension to the complexity described above.
References
Bibliography
*Innes, Gordon. 1966. ''An Introduction to Grebo.'' London: Luzac.
*Innes, Gordon. 1967. ''A Grebo-English dictionary.'' (''West African Language Monographs'', 6) London: Cambridge University Press.
*Ingemann, Frances, and John Duitsman. "A Survey of Grebo Dialects in Liberia," ''Liberian Studies Journal'', 7(2):121-131, 1976.
*
Greenberg, Joseph H., ''
The Languages of Africa''. Indiana Univ. Press, 1966).
*Hasselbring, Sue and Eric Johnson. ''A sociolinguistic survey of the Grebo language area of Liberia. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-074'', 2002. Online version:
*Payne, John. 1867. ''A Dictionary of the Grebo Language.'' Philadelphia: King and Baird.
External links
*US Navy map of ''Maryland in Liberia'', 1853
{{Kru languages
Grebo languages,
Languages of Liberia
Kru languages