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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.
The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast.
Liberian English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Liberia. Four such varieties exist:
The Kru, Krao, Kroo, or Krou are a West African ethnic group who are indigenous to western Ivory Coast and eastern Liberia. European and American writers often called Kru men who enlisted as sailors or mariners Krumen. They migrated and settled along various points of the West African coast, notably Freetown, Sierra Leone, but also the Ivorian and Nigerian coasts. The Kru-speaking people are a large ethnic group that is made up of several sub-ethnic groups in Liberia and Ivory Coast. In Liberia, there are 48 sub-sections of Kru tribes, including the Jlao Kru. These tribes include Bété, Bassa, Krumen, Guéré, Grebo, Klao/Krao, Dida, Krahn people and Jabo people.
Grand Kru County is a county in the southeastern portion of Liberia. One of 15 counties that comprise the first-level of administrative division in the nation, it has eighteen districts. Organized in 1984, its capital is Barclayville. The area of the county measures 1,504 square miles (3,900 km2). As of the 2008 Census, it had a population of 109,342, making it the third-least populous county in Liberia.
The Bassa language is a Kru language spoken by about 600,000 Bassa people in Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone.
The term Krumen refers to historical sailors from the Kru people group living mostly along the coast of Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire. One theory, advanced in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, was that the term Kru or Krumen derived from Klao, which is the name of the Kru in their language. Their numbers were estimated to be 48,300 in 1993, of whom 28,300 were in Côte d’Ivoire. They are a subgroup of the Grebo and speak the Krumen language.
The Jabo language is a Kru language spoken by the Jabo people of Liberia. They have also been known in the past as the Gweabo.
Jabo is the self-designation of an ethnic group located in the southeastern part of the Republic of Liberia in West Africa. They have also sometimes referred to themselves as Gweabo or Nimiah tribe.
The Grebo or Glebo people are an ethnic group or subgroup within the larger Kru group of Africa, a language and cultural ethnicity, and to certain of its constituent elements. Within Liberia members of this group are found primarily in Maryland County and Grand Kru County in the southeastern portion of the country, but also in River Gee County and Sinoe County. The Grebo population in Côte d'Ivoire are known as the Krumen and are found in the southwestern corner of that country.
Grebo is a dialect cluster of the Kru languages, spoken by the Grebo people of present-day Liberia and the Krumen of Ivory Coast in West Africa.
Dan is a Southern Mande language spoken primarily in Ivory Coast and Liberia. There is also a population of about 800 speakers in Guinea. Dan is a tonal language, with 9 to 11 contour and register tones, depending on the dialect.
Klao, or Kru, is a Kru language of the Niger–Congo language family, spoken primarily in Liberia, with some speakers also in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Guinea. It uses SVO word order for main clauses and SOV for embedded clauses. A Klao translation of the Bible by missionary Nancy Lightfoot was released in 2000. The language has Western, West Central, Central, and Eastern dialects.
The Cantonese Romanisation system known as Barnett–Chao is based on the principles of the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system (GR) developed by Yuen Ren Chao in the 1920s, which he modified in 1947. The B-C system is a modification in 1950 by K M A Barnett from Yuen Ren Chao's romanisation system. It was adopted by the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (SOAS).
Liberia is a multilingual country where more than 20 indigenous languages are spoken. English is the official language, and Liberian Kreyol is the vernacular lingua franca, though mostly spoken as a second language.
Loma is a Mande language spoken by the Loma people of Liberia and Guinea.
Krumen is a dialect continuum spoken by the Krumen people of Liberia and Ivory Coast. It is a branch of the Grebo languages, a subfamily of the Kru languages and ultimately of the Niger–Congo languages. It had 48,300 speakers in 1993. The main varieties are:
Grebo may refer to:
William Wadé Harris was a Liberian Grebo evangelist, who preached in Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. He has been described as the "most extraordinary one man evangelical crusade that Africa has ever known" and is considered one of the originators of today's prosperity gospel.
Wobé (Ouobe) is a indigenous Kru language spoken in Ivory Coast. It is one of several languages in a dialect continuum called Wèè (Wɛɛ).
References
- ↑ Barclayville Grebo at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ↑ Gordon Innes, A Grebo - English Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, 1967
- ↑ Gordon Innes, as above. A dictionary was compiled from previous dictionaries and the speech of Assistant 1955-1957 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, Mr. J.Y.Dennis
- ↑ Innes, Gordon (1966). An Introduction to Grebo. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
