Nawdm is a

Gur language The Gur languages, also known as Central Gur or Mabia, belong to the Niger–Congo languages. They are spoken in the Sahelian and savanna regions of West Africa, namely: in most areas of Burkina Faso, and in south-central Mali, northeastern Ivor ...

Togo Togo, officially the Togolese Republic, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to Ghana–Togo border, the west, Benin to Benin–Togo border, the east and Burkina Faso to Burkina Faso–Togo border, the north. It is one of the le ...

and

Ghana Ghana, officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It is situated along the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and shares borders with Côte d’Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, and Togo to t ...

. There are approximately 190,000 speakers in Togo and 8,000 in Ghana.

Nawdm in Ghana

Nawdm is spoken in the

Greater Accra Region The Greater Accra Region has the smallest area of Ghana's Regions of Ghana, 16 administrative regions, occupying a total land surface of 3,245 square kilometres. This is 1.4 per cent of the total land area of Ghana. It is the List of Ghanaian re ...

and the

Oti Region The Oti Region is one of the six newly created regions of Ghana in December 2018. The region was carved out of the Volta Region and will be in fulfillment of a campaign promise made by New Patriotic Party. Prior to the 2016 Ghanaian general elec ...

. It is known by several names including "loso" (or "losu"), and "nawdm" (sometimes spelled "naoudem" or "nawdam"). The first of these terms is improper and ambiguous. It is given by other language groups to refer to the Lamba (those who do not speak Nawdm) and the Nawdba (those who speak Nawdm).

Nawdm In Togo

It is spoken in the

Doufelgou Prefecture Doufelgou is a Prefectures of Togo, prefecture located in the Kara Region of Togo. The prefecture covers 1,151 km2, with a population in 2022 of 84,767. The capital city is Niamtougou. Doufelgou means White Mountain (white= felm & mountain= ...

which is located in the

Kara Region Kara Region () is one of Togo's five regions. Kara is the regional capital. Other major cities in the Kara region include Bafilo, Bassar, Kpagouda and Niamtougou. Kara is divided into the prefectures of Assoli, Bassar, Bimah, Dankpen, ...

. Region—more precisely in the

cantons of Togo The Cantons of Togo are the third-level administrative units of the country, after regions and prefectures; which in turn they are subdivided into villages. They are similar to communes or sub-districts or sub-prefectures of other French Africa ...

Niamtougou, Koka, Baga, Ténéga and Siou. Nawdm is also spoken in the villages of Bogawaré and Kawa-Bas in the canton of Pouda, and in the village of Koré-Nata in the canton of Massédéna, still in the prefecture of Doufelgou. Historically, the latter are the descendants of the village of Banaa, formerly located roughly equidistant from Koka, Ténéga and Siou-Kpadb, on the outskirts of what is now called SORAD (from (Refinancing and Development Company)), from whence they were driven out by the people of Baga shortly before the arrival of the Germans. The immediate neighbors of the Nawdba in this prefecture are: in the North, the Lamba of Défalé; in the South, the Kabyè of Pya; to the east, the Kabyè of Massédéna and Péssaré; to the west, the Lamba of Agbandé and of Yaka. According to the most recent classifications of Bendor-Samuel in 1989 and those of Heine and Nurse in 2004, Nawdm belongs to the Yom–Nawdm group of the Oti-Volta subfamily of the central Gur or Voltaic languages, the Gur family itself being a branch of the Niger–Congo languages. These classifications are based on the work of historical and comparative linguistics of Gabriel Manessy who demonstrated that Nawdm was not, as some had initially believed, a dialect of Mooré, but a language which, while certainly being related to Mooré, however, belongs to another linguistic sub-group. The term Losso is a vague local designation, never employed by linguists, referring to both the Nawdm and Lamba people.

Orthography

To distinguish a sequence of two consonants and a consonant represented by two letters, the diaeresis is used on the first letters of the sequence of two consonants, for example: the sequence of consonants (g̈w, g̈b, n̈y, ŋ̈m). The uppercase letter ''Ĥ'' corresponds to the lowercase letter ''ɦ'' (the usual correspondence would be Ĥ/ĥ or Ɦ/ɦ). This transcribes the

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

. The

high tone High Tone is a dub band from Lyon, France. Formed in 1997, the band came with an emergence of the French dub music Scene, with bands like Brain Damage, Kaly Live Dub, Le Peuple de l'Herbe, Improvisators Dub or Meï Teï Shô. Formed by five ...

is denoted by the

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 ...

and the low tone is denoted by the

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 ...

, although in usual writing, the tone is only written in pronouns.

External links

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References

Oti–Volta languages Languages of Togo {{gur-lang-stub