Ewe

Story

Ewe belongs to the Gbe cluster of the Niger-Congo family and is spoken across a coastal strip from southeastern Ghana through Togo into Benin, with dialects varying so widely that villages just a few kilometres apart can have distinct varieties. The written standard was created in 1847 by German missionaries of the Norddeutsche Missions-Gesellschaft (Bremen), with the first grammar published in 1857 using the coastal Anlo dialect as a base, and the current orthography draws on the African alphabet devised in the 1920s. The language has a rich tonal system of three registers and three contour tones, and features rare phonemes including a bilabial fricative written as an f-with-hook and a voiced bilabial-velar stop written as gb. Ewe is an official national language of Togo and a government-backed regional language in Ghana, used in schools, radio, and television in both countries.

At a glance

• Also known as: Eʋegbe
• Family: Niger-Congo
• Region: West Africa
• Speakers: 8M (estimated total speakers across ghana, togo, and benin; gbe languages wikipedia entry cites 10.3 million for ewe in ghana and togo alone; native speaker estimates from various sources range from 5 to 8 million l1)
• Writing system: Latin (Ewe alphabet using the African Reference Alphabet, developed from 1847 by Bremen missionaries)
• Greeting: Ŋdi (good morning / hello)

Spoken in

Ghana, Togo, Benin

Common questions