Kusaal language
| Kusaal | |
|---|---|
| Kusasi | |
| Region | Ghana |
| Ethnicity | Kusasi people |
|
Native speakers
|
440,000 (2004) |
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | kusa1250 |
Kusaal, or Kusasi (Qusasi), is a Gur language spoken primarily in northern Ghana. It is spoken by roughly 400,000 people and takes its name from the Kusasi people, who form the majority of the population of the area in the far northeast of Ghana, between the Gambaga escarpment, the Red Volta, and the national borders with Togo and Burkina Faso. There are some villages of Kusaasi in Burkina and also a few speakers in Togo. Kusaal is closely related to Mampruli, the language of the Mamprussi, who live to the south, and to Dagbani. There is a major dialect division between Agole, to the east of the White Volta river, and Toende, to the West. Agole has more speakers, and the only large town of the district, Bawku, is in Agole. The New Testament translation is in the Agole dialect.
The language is a fairly typical representative of the Western Oti–Volta low-level grouping within Gur, which includes several of the more widely spoken languages of Northern Ghana, and also Moore, the largest African language of Burkina Faso (and the largest of all Gur languages, with millions of speakers).
Like most other Western Oti–Volta languages, it has lost the complicated noun class agreement system still found in e.g. the more distantly related Gurmanche, and has only a natural gender system, human/non-human. The noun classes are still distinguishable in the way nouns distinguish singular from plural by paired suffixes:
nid(a) "person" plural nidib(a)
buug(a) "goat" plural buus(e)
nobir(e) "leg, foot" plural noba(a)
fuug(o) "item of clothing" plural fuud(e)
molif(o) "gazelle" plural moli(i)
A unpaired suffix -m(m) is found with many uncountable and abstract nouns, e.g. ku'om(m) "water"
The bracketed final vowels in the examples occur because of the feature which most strikingly separates Kusaal from its close relatives: the underlying forms of words, such as buuga "goat" are found only when the word in question is the last word in a question or a negated statement. In all other contexts an underlying final short vowel is dropped and a final long vowel is shortened:
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