Vagla language

Vagla
Vagla
Region	Ghana
Native speakers	14,000 (2003); (may include speakers of Siti)
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Gur Southern Gurunsi Western Vagla; ; ; ; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	vag
Glottolog	vagl1239 Vagla

Vagla is a Gurunsi (Gur) language of Ghana with about 14,000 speakers. It is spoken in a number of communities around the western area of Northern Region, Ghana. Such communities includes: Bole, Sawla, Tuna, Soma, Gentilpe, and Nakwabi. The people who speak this language are known as Vaglas, one of the indigenous tribes around that part of the Northern Region, which were brought under the Gonja local administration system "Gonjaland" by British Colonial Rulers under their Centralised System of Governance.

Phonology

Consonants

Consonants^[2]
		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labial- velar	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p	t	c	k	kp
Plosive	voiced	b	d	ɟ	g	gb
Nasal		m	n	ɲ	ŋ	ŋm
Fricative	voiceless	f	s				h
Fricative	voiced	v	z
Approximant			l	j		w

Vowels

Vowels^[2]
	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Close-mid	ɪ		ʊ
Mid	e		o
Open-mid	ɛ	(ʌ)	ɔ
Open		a

Blench uses /ʌ/, which is described as a -ATR counterpart of /a/.^[3]
All vowels can be long or short. Two similar vowels are not treated as a long vowel due to tone patterns.^[4]

Tones

Vagla has four tones: rising, falling, and two level tones. It also has downstep. Nasals and laterals can also carry tones.^[4]

Orthography

Vagla uses ⟨i⟩ to represent both /i/ and /ɪ/, and it uses ⟨u⟩ to represent /u/ and /ʊ/.^[4]

Nasalization is represented by a following ⟨h⟩, e.g., sɛɛ 'to agree' and sɛɛh 'to carve'.^[4]

Notes

^ Vagla at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
^ ^a ^b Blench 2003, p. 18.
^ Blench 2003, p. 18, citing Crouch & Naden 1998.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Blench 2003, p. 19.

References

Blench, Roger (2003). "Plural verb morphology in Vagla" (PDF). Cahiers Voltaïques. 6: 17–31. Archived (PDF) from the original on 20 April 2015. Retrieved 31 August 2024.
Crouch, Marjory; Naden, Anthony (1998). "A semantically-based grammar of Vagla". Gur Papers (Special issue I). Bayreuth: University of Bayreuth. OCLC 174505065.