Ega language

Ega, also known as Egwa and Diès, is a West African language spoken in south-central Ivory Coast. It appears to be a Kwa language of uncertain affiliation.

Ega
Native to	Ivory Coast
Region	near Gly or Gli, Sud-Bandama region
Native speakers	2,500 (2001)[1]
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Volta-Congo Kwa Ega
Language codes
ISO 639-3	ega
Glottolog	egaa1242
ELP	Ega

Demographics

Ega is spoken in 21 villages near Gly in Diès Canton, Gôh-Djiboua District, Ivory Coast (Bole-Richard 1983: 359).^[2] Some villages are Broudougou, Gly, Dairo, Didizo, and Douzaroko.^[3] The Ega people are increasing in number, though some are shifting to Dida through intermarriage.

Documentation

A language documentation fieldwork project on Ega was conducted by a team from Universität Bielefeld, Germany (Dafydd Gibbon) and Université Houphouet Boigny, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire (Firmin Ahoua) from 2000 to 2003 in cooperation with York University, Canada (Bruce Connell).^[4]

Classification

Ega appears to be a divergent Western Kwa language within the Niger–Congo language family spoken in Ivory Coast. It does not appear to belong to any of the traditional branches of Niger–Congo. Blench (2017) classifies Ega as a Western Kwa language that has borrowed from Kru, Gur, and Mande.^[3]

Cultural and economic context

Like other Western Kwa languages, traditional story-telling among the Ega people has a fairly strict schedule: after an introduction by the narrator, a well-defined role in the village, the narration proceeds, punctuated by responder's interjection [sɛsɛ], and interspersed with song interludes with the call and response structure of work songs.

The economy of the Ega community is partly horticultural, partly dependent on plantation work. Hunting is practised with nets which are used to enclose an area of several hundred square meters, within which small game such as agouti (Thryonomys swinderianus) are cornered by a group of beaters. The nets resemble the local canoe trawling nets used on the southern Côte d'Ivoire coast about 100km further south, and possibly indicate a history of coastal migration.

Phonology

Ega has twenty-seven consonants. Its stops have a three-way contrast between voiceless, voiced, and implosive.

Consonant phonemes^[5]

		Labial	Alveolar	Dorsal
				front	plain	labial
Nasal		m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Plosive	implosive	ɓ	ɗ	ʄ	ɠ	ɠɓ
	voiced	b	d	ɟ	ɡ	ɡb
	voiceless	p	t	c	k	kp
Fricative	voiced	v	z
	voiceless	f	s		x
Approximant			l	j		w

There are nine vowels, with ATR contrast: /i̙/, /i̘/, /u̙/, /u̘/, /e̙/, /e̘/, /o̙/, /o̘/, and /a/.

There are three tones: high, mid, and low.