Ewe

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Here we illustrate fricatives of Ewe as well as double articulations, dental and retroflex stops and tone in Ewe.

Fricatives

Below is the example from the Sounds of the World's Languages (SoWL) of contrasting bilabial and labiodental fricatives. Ewe, which is spoken in Ghana, is one of several West African languages exhibiting this contrast.


	éɸé	éfá
	ɛ̀βɛ̀	èvè

See Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008, pp. 139-142) for detailed discussion of articulation and acoustics.
Notes on the sonagrams: High frequency energy is weaker in the bilabials.
Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008) report more lowering of F2 for the bilabials, but this is hardly visible here.

Double articulations in Ewe

The utterances from Ewe below demonstrate labial-velar double articulations. Note in particular the combinations of double consonant plus /l/ in word- or syllable-initial position (otherwise Ewe has virtually no consonant clusters).

Note:
Ewe is a tone language, but tone has not been indicated in the transcriptions below.
Also see the demo of labialization in Igbo
.


ag͜ble ag͜bodzedze ag͜bale ag͜bag͜badzedze	afɔk͜pa k͜posɔ nuk͜pɔk͜plɔ ak͜ple	apa ak͜pa aka k͜plu akutu ablotsi ag͜badɔ agutɔ ba ag͜bo bubu k͜plɔ klo

Dental and retroflex stops in Ewe

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Ewe belongs to the 'Kwa' group of languages and is spoken in Ghana and Togo, West Africa. G. Ansre, writing in the 1960s, considers it one of the best documented West African languages, and gives the number of speakers as nearly 2 million.
It is a good example of the quite numerous languages that contrast two stops in the region from dental to what might loosely be called retroflex.

Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008) characterize the distinction as laminal dental (or dentalveolar) vs. apical (post)-alveolar, the latter often being referred to (and transcribed) as retroflex. See Ladefoged & Maddieson (2008, pp. 25-26) for palatograms and further discussion. They feel that the apical sound shows only slight retroflexion, possibly less than the retroflex sounds of Hindi, which in turn probably has less retroflexion than the corresponding sounds in Dravidian languages such as Tamil or Malayalam.


d̪ìd̪ì ("long")	ɖìɖì ("burial")

Notes:
(1) The accent indicates low tone.
(2) Ladefoged and Maddieson (2008) use the subscript dot, e.g. [ḍ], rather than the traditional IPA symbol used here, for slightly retroflexed sounds.

For sonagrams of both words click here. It is very difficult to see much difference in the formants. However, the dental shows more noise in the region around 5kHz at stop release, indicating more affrication than the apical retroflex. The greater amount of frication can also be seen in the timewave (click here).

Tone in Ewe - Basic contrasts

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1. One syllable words: low vs. high

low	high
fe ("dept")	fe ("split v.")
fa ("cry v.")	fa ("comfort v.")
bu ("respect v.")	bu ("lose v.")
do ("go out")	do ("put on dress")
dɔ ("hunger")	dɔ ("pass the night")

2. Two syllable words: low+low vs. high+high

low+low	high+high
akpa ("envelope")	akpa ("too much")

3. Two syllable words: low+low vs. low+high

low+low	low+high
afi ("mouse")	afi ("ash")

Note: Mid tones also occur in Ewe, but do not contrast with low tones.

Audio Source:
Sounds of the World's Languages.
Schiefercorpus.

References:
Ladefoged, P. / Maddieson, I. (2008): The Sounds of the World's Languages. Malden, MA: Blackwell.