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James Essegbey (University of Florida) – Contact-induced Change in Ghana-Togo Mountain Languages
February 5, 2021
9:00 am
ZOOM Virtual Room (Link will be provided)

James Essegbey (University of Florida) – Contact-induced Change in Ghana-Togo Mountain Languages

Contact-induced Change in Ghana-Togo Mountain Languages

Languages used in multilingual ecologies tend to be influenced. Depending on the nature of the contact, the influence may be from a dominant regional language to another. The effects of such contact can lead to language shift, thereby impacting the intergenerational transmission or it could be in terms of language structure and culture leading to a homogenization of the languages and reducing typological characteristics of the influenced language. In this talk, Dr. Essegbey explores the contact-induced changes that have occurred in Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages. GTM languages, as the name suggests, are spoken along the mountain ranges along the Ghana-Togo border in West Africa. GTM speakers have one GTM language and at least one dominant regional language. Dr. Essegbey demonstrates from his documentation work how Ewe - a (New) Kwa language spoken in Ghana, Togo, and Benin - has influenced the southern GTM languages phonologically, morpho-syntactically, and semantically.