Ga language
Encyclopedia
The Ga language is a Kwa language
spoken in Ghana
, in and around the capital Accra
. It has a phonemic distinction between 3 vowel lengths.
language, part of the Niger–Congo family
. It is very closely related to Adangme
, and together they form the Ga–Dangme branch within Kwa.
Ga is the name of the Tribe.
Ga is the language spoken.
Gamashie is the name of the capital of the Ga tribe in Ghana.
, in and around the capital Accra
. It has relatively little dialectal variation.
Although English is the official language of Ghana, Ga is one of 16 languages in which the Bureau of Ghana Languages publishes material.
is an allophone of /w/ which occurs before nasals and is represented with its own digraph in writing. may be realised as [r] when between a consonant and vowel has an allophone [ɲ] before nasal vowels
s: short, long or extra long (the latter appears only in the simple future and the simple past negative forms).
.
several geographical and physical phenomena had been recognised by the Gas to be orgins of spiiritual powers and life. Centrall to the Ga custom is the Korle Lagoon, Osu Klottey lagoon, Kpeshie lagoon and other waterbodies are believed to have deities in them for rituals are performed annually to pacify and honour them.
The writing system is a Latin
-based alphabet
and has 26 letters. It has three additional letter symbols which correspond to the IPA
symbols. There are also eleven digraphs and two trigraphs. Vowel length is represented by doubling or tripling the vowel symbol, eg 'a', 'aa' and 'aaa'. Tones are not represented. Nasalisation is represented after oral consonant
s where it distinguishes between minimal pairs.
The Ga alphabet is:
Aa, Bb, Dd, Ee, , Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, , Oo, , Pp, Rr, Ss, Tt, Uu, Vv, Ww, Yy, Zz
The following letters represent sounds which do not correspond with the same letter as the IPA
symbol (eg B represents /b/):
Digraphs and trigraphs:
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 Côte d'Ivoire, across southern Ghana, and in central Togo...
spoken in Ghana
Ghana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
, in and around the capital Accra
Accra
Accra is the capital and largest city of Ghana, with an urban population of 1,658,937 according to the 2000 census. Accra is also the capital of the Greater Accra Region and of the Accra Metropolitan District, with which it is coterminous...
. It has a phonemic distinction between 3 vowel lengths.
Classification
Ga is a KwaKwa 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 Côte d'Ivoire, across southern Ghana, and in central Togo...
language, part of the Niger–Congo family
Niger–Congo languages
The Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question...
. It is very closely related to Adangme
Adangme language
Adangme , is a Kwa language spoken in south-eastern Ghana by 800,000 people.Some sources list Adangbe as another name for the same language whereas lists it as a different language in the Kwa family, and it has a separate ISO 639-3 code of 'adq'.-Classification:Adangme is a Kwa language, part of...
, and together they form the Ga–Dangme branch within Kwa.
Ga is the name of the Tribe.
Ga is the language spoken.
Gamashie is the name of the capital of the Ga tribe in Ghana.
Geographic distribution
Ga is spoken in south-eastern GhanaGhana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
, in and around the capital Accra
Accra
Accra is the capital and largest city of Ghana, with an urban population of 1,658,937 according to the 2000 census. Accra is also the capital of the Greater Accra Region and of the Accra Metropolitan District, with which it is coterminous...
. It has relatively little dialectal variation.
Although English is the official language of Ghana, Ga is one of 16 languages in which the Bureau of Ghana Languages publishes material.
Consonants
Ga has 31 consonant phonemes.| Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... |
Dental | Postalveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate... and palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Labial- velar Labial-velar consonant Labial–velar consonants are doubly articulated at the velum and the lips. They are sometimes called "labiovelar consonants", a term that can also refer to labialized velars, such as and the approximant .... |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plain | Labialized | Plain | Lab.v | Plain | Lab. | |||||||||||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ŋ͡m | |||||||||||
| Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... |
p | b | t | d | tʃ | dʒ | tʃʷ | dʒʷ | k | ɡ | kʷ | ɡʷ | k͡p | ɡ͡b | ||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
f | v | s | z | ʃ | ʃʷ | h | hʷ | ||||||||
| Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
l | j | ɥ | w | ||||||||||||
is an allophone of /w/ which occurs before nasals and is represented with its own digraph in writing. may be realised as [r] when between a consonant and vowel has an allophone [ɲ] before nasal vowels
Vowels
Ga has 7 oral vowels and 5 nasal vowels. All of the vowels have 3 different vowel lengthVowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
s: short, long or extra long (the latter appears only in the simple future and the simple past negative forms).
| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| oral | nasal Nasal vowel A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. By contrast, oral vowels are ordinary vowels without this nasalisation... |
oral | nasal Nasal vowel A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. By contrast, oral vowels are ordinary vowels without this nasalisation... |
oral | nasal Nasal vowel A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. By contrast, oral vowels are ordinary vowels without this nasalisation... |
|
| Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the... |
i | ĩ | u | ũ | ||
| Close-mid Close-mid vowel A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel... |
e | o | ||||
| Open-mid Open-mid vowel An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel... |
ɛ | ɛ̃ | ɔ | ɔ̃ | ||
| Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue... |
a | ã |
Tones
Ga has 2 tones, high and low. Like many West African languages, it has tone terracingTone terracing
Tone terracing is a type of phonetic downdrift, where the high or mid tones, but not the low tone, shift downward in pitch after certain other tones...
.
Phonotactics
The syllable structure of Ga is (C)(C)V(C), where the second phoneme of an initial consonant cluster can only be /l/ and a final consonant may only be a (short or long) nasal consonant, e.g. ekome, "one", V-CV-CV; kakadaŋŋ, "long", CV-CV-CVC; mli, "body", CCV. Ga syllables may also consist solely of a syllabic nasal, for example in the first syllable of ŋshɔ, "sea".several geographical and physical phenomena had been recognised by the Gas to be orgins of spiiritual powers and life. Centrall to the Ga custom is the Korle Lagoon, Osu Klottey lagoon, Kpeshie lagoon and other waterbodies are believed to have deities in them for rituals are performed annually to pacify and honour them.
Writing system
Ga was first written by Christian Jacobsen Protten, who was the son of a Danish soldier and an African woman, in about 1764. The orthography has been revised a number of times since 1968, with the most recent review in 1990.The writing system is a Latin
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
-based alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
and has 26 letters. It has three additional letter symbols which correspond to the IPA
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
symbols. There are also eleven digraphs and two trigraphs. Vowel length is represented by doubling or tripling the vowel symbol, eg 'a', 'aa' and 'aaa'. Tones are not represented. Nasalisation is represented after oral consonant
Oral consonant
An oral consonant is a consonant sound in speech that is made by allowing air to escape from the mouth, as opposed to the nose. To create an intended oral consonant sound, the entire mouth plays a role in modifying the air's passageway. This rapid modification of the air passageway using the tongue...
s where it distinguishes between minimal pairs.
The Ga alphabet is:
Aa, Bb, Dd, Ee, , Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, , Oo, , Pp, Rr, Ss, Tt, Uu, Vv, Ww, Yy, Zz
The following letters represent sounds which do not correspond with the same letter as the IPA
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
symbol (eg B represents /b/):
- J j - /d͡ʒ/
- Y y - /j/
Digraphs and trigraphs:
- Gb gb - /ɡb/
- Gw gw - /ɡʷ/
- Hw hw - /hʷ/
- Jw jw - /d͡ʒʷ/
- Kp kp - /kp/
- Kw kw - /kʷ/
- Ny ny - /ɲ/ - /ŋm/ - [ŋʷ] (an allophone rather than a phoneme)
- Sh sh - /ʃ/
- Ts ts - /t͡ʃ/
- Shw shw - /ʃʷ/
- Tsw tsw - /t͡ʃʷ/