Logba language

Logba is a language spoken in the south-eastern Ghana by approximately 7 500 people (Dorvlo 2004). The Logba people call their language Ikpana, which means ‘defenders of truth’. Logba is generally classified as a member of the Kwa branch of the larger Niger-Congo phylum. It is different from Lukpa of Togo and Benin, which is sometimes referred to as Logba.

Geography and demography

The Logba people live in the Volta Region of Ghana, east of the Volta Lake in the mountains of the Ghana-Togo borderland. Most Logba towns and villages are situated along the trunk road from Accra to Hohoe. They include the following settlements: Wuinta, Akusame, Adiveme, Andokɔfe, Adzakoe, Alakpeti, Klikpo, and Tota. Tota is located high in the Ghana Togo Mountains to the east of the Accra-Hohoe road. Alikpeti is the commercial centre of Logba, while Klikpo is traditionally the seat of the head of the Logba people. The Logba people are peasant farmers, producing cassava, maize, yams, and cahs crops like cocoa and coffee. The Logba area is know for its limestone formations, including underground caves with stalagmites and stalactites.

The dominant language in the regio is Ewe, closely followed by Twi. Most Logba people are bilingual in Ewe. South of the Logba area live the Avatime people. Logba is distantly related to Avatime and to the Nyagbo-Tafi language south of Avatime.

It is generally agreed that the Logba people are not the original inhabitants of the area they now reside in. There have been two hypotheses as to the origin of the Logba people. Heine (1964) proposed that the Logba are descendants from the makɔ́ people, having fled south after a defeat in the second half of the 18th century. However, the Logba people themselves relate that they have come together with the Gbe peoples from Ketu^[1]. The latter view is advanced also by Dorvlo (2004).

Linguistic features

Logba has a nine vowel system with ATR vowel harmony. Vowels are nasalized when they occur in the immediate environment of a nasal consonant. Logba has a total of 23 consonants. A notable feature of Logba phonology is the opposition between bilabial and labio-dental fricatives, found in various other languages of the region, including Ewe. Logba is a tonal language with two level tones: High and Low. This tones can be combined on one syllable, yielding a Rising or Falling contour tone.

All syllables are open in Logba. Every syllable bears a tone. The basic syllable structure can be rendered as (C₁)(C₂)V+T, where C = consonant, V = vowel or syllabic nasal, and T = tone. Dorvlo (2004) distinguishes three types of syllables:

1. Nucleus only, comprised of a vowel or a syllabic nasal. This type is found only in pronouns and nominal prefixes. Examples: ɛ́-mɔ́ 'they laughed'; ɔ́-zɔ́ 'he/she went'; n-dà 'liquor'.
2. Onset and nucleus. This is the most common syllabe type in Logba; most words are of this form. In multisyllabic words, it can occur in all positions. Examples: bà ‘come’; gbà^[2] ‘sweep’; bìsí ‘cola nut’
3. Complex onset and nucleus. Only /r/ and /l/ occur as the second consonant of the complex onset. This syllable type can also form a word by itself. In multisyllabic words, in can occur in all positions. Examples: à-klɔ́   ‘goat’; trò ‘refuse’; ìvàflí   ‘(thing) white’.

Notes and references

Endnotes

1. ^ Heine (1964:30fn8) is aware of the oral history of the Logba but dismisses this account, professedly because Westermann did not write anything about it.
2. ^ /gb/ is not a sequence of /g/ and /b/; it is a digraph for the labio-velar stop, a double articulation common in many African languages.

References

• Blench, Roger (2001). Comparative Central Togo: What have we learnt since Heine? (paper presented at the 32nd Annual Conference on African Linguistics and subsequently revised), 39p.
• Dorvlo, Kofi (2004). ‘A Preliminary Phonology of Logba’, in Kropp Dakubu & Osam (eds.) Studies in the Languages of the Volta Basin II (Proceedings of the annual colloquium of the Legon-Trondheim Linguistics Project 12-13 January 2004). Legon: University of Ghana, pp. 239–249.
• Greenberg 1966 as cited in Dorvlo 2004
• Heine, Bernd (1968) Die Verbreitung und Gliedering der Togorestsprachen (Kölner Beiträge zur Afrikanistik vol. 1). Köln: Druckerei Wienand. [pp. 29–30, 100–101]
• Ladefoged, Peter (1964) A Phonetic Study of West African Languages (an auditory-instrumental survey). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [pp. 54]

External links

• Logba on the Ethnologue
• Logba on the Rosetta Project
• The Southern Ghana-Togo Mountain Groups: A description of their languages and cultural heritage. (CNWS research project).