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The term dialect is used in two distinct ways to refer to two different types of linguistic phenomena:
As of 2006, Liberia has the highest population growth rate in the world. 43.5% of Liberians were below the age of 15 in 2010. With recent civil wars being fought along ethnic lines, Liberia is a multiethnic and multicultural country. Diversity has always been celebrated in Liberian culture — ethnicity-based civil wars aside — in regard to cuisine, music, fashion, language and people.
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majority of consonants are oral consonants. Examples of nasals in English are, and, in words such as nose, bring and mouth. Nasal occlusives are nearly universal in human languages. There are also other kinds of nasal consonants in some languages.
The Kru languages belong to the Niger–Congo language family and are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the east of Ivory Coast.
Yoruba is a language spoken in West Africa and most prominently South western Nigeria. Spoken by the ethnic Yoruba people, The number of speakers of Yoruba is estimated at between 45 and 55 million. As a pluricentric language, it is spoken in a wide dialectal area spanning Nigeria, Benin and Togo, with communities in Sierra Leone and Liberia as well as smaller pockets in other parts of West Africa.
Liberian English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Liberia. There are five such varieties:
The Kru or Kroo are a West African ethnic group who are indigenous to eastern Liberia and migrated and settled along various points of the West African coast, notably Freetown, Sierra Leone, but also the Ivorian and Nigerian coasts. The Kru were famous for their skills in navigating and sailing the Atlantic. Their maritime expertise evolved along the west coast of Africa as they made livings as fishermen and traders. Knowing the in-shore waters of the western coast of Africa, and having nautical experience, they were employed as sailors, navigators and interpreters aboard slave ships, as well as American and British warships used against the slave trade.
Maryland 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 two districts. Harper serves as the capital with the area of the county measuring 2,297 square kilometres (887 sq mi). As of the 2008 Census, it had a population of 136,404, making it the seventh most populous county in Liberia. The flag of Maryland County is widely regarded in the vexillological community to be an example of an incredibly terribly designed flag.
In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting: for example by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal, choosing words that are considered more "formal", and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as ain't.
In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally considered by a society to be the most "correct" or otherwise superior. In many cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions, particularly in situations of covert prestige. In addition to dialects and languages, prestige is also applied to smaller linguistic features, such as the pronunciation or usage of words or grammatical constructs, which may not be pronounced enough to constitute a separate dialect. The concept of prestige provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in form, among speakers of a language or languages.
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 3,895 square kilometres (1,504 sq mi). As of the 2008 Census, it had a population of 57,106, making it the least populous county in Liberia.
The Krumen is an ethnic group living mostly along the coast of Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire. Their numbers were estimated to be 48,300 in 1993, of which 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.
Grebo people is a term used to refer to 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.
Liberian Americans are an ethnic group of Americans of full or partial Liberian ancestry. This includes Liberians who are of American descent. It also includes the descendants of Americo-Liberian people in America. The first wave of Liberians to the United States, after the slavery period, was after of the First Liberian Civil War in the 1980s and, then, after the Second Liberian Civil War in the early 2000s. An estimated 100,000 Liberians live in the U.S. as of this time. The diplomatic relationship between Liberia and the USA goes back over 150 years since Liberia's foundation by returning African slaves freed by abolitionist societies which set aside land for the freedmen and paved the way to its independence.
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:
Grebo is a Kru language of Liberia. All of the Grebo languages commonly go by the term Grebo, though in Ivory Coast Krumen is usual. Grebo country is in the extreme south-west of Liberia on the coast and inland, between the rivers Cavally and Cess.
Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the historical rhotic consonant in all contexts by speakers of certain varieties of English. The presence or absence of rhoticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. In rhotic varieties, the historical English sound is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments—that is, when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, whereas a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound, pronouncing them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "tuner amp", most non-rhotic speakers will pronounce the in that position, since it is followed by a vowel in this case. Not all non-rhotic varieties use the linking R; for example, it is absent in non-rhotic varieties of Southern American English.
References
- ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Grebo". Glottolog 3.0 . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- ↑ Classified as a dialect of Southern Grebo by ISO 639-3.