Consonants[]
| Bilabial | Labiodental | Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Labial-velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | k | k͡p | ||||
| voiced | m ~ b | d | ɳ ~ ɖ | ɲ ~ j | ŋ ~ ɡ | ɡ͡b | |||
| Affricate | voiceless | t͡s | |||||||
| voiced | d͡z | ||||||||
| Fricative | voiceless | ɸ | f | s | x | ||||
| voiced | β | v | z | ɣ ~ ɰ ~ w | ʁ ~ ʕ ~ ɦ | ||||
| Approximant | l ~ l̃ | ||||||||
| Tap | (ɾ ~ ɾ̃) | ||||||||
H is a voiced fricative which has been described as uvular, [ʁ], pharyngeal, [ʕ], or glottal [ɦ].
The nasal consonants [m, n, ɲ, ŋ] are not distinctive, as they only appear before nasal vowels. Ewe is therefore sometimes said to have no nasal consonants. However, it is more economical to argue that nasal /m, n, ɲ, ŋ/ are the underlying form, and are denasalized before oral vowels. (See vowels below.)
[ɣ] occurs before unrounded (non-back) vowels and [w] before rounded (back) vowels.
Ewe is one of the few languages known to contrast [f] vs. [ɸ] and [v] vs. [β]. The f and v are stronger than in most languages, [f͈] and [v͈], with the upper lip noticeably raised, and thus more distinctive from the rather weak [ɸ] and [β].[1]
/l/ may occur in consonant clusters. It becomes [ɾ] (or [ɾ̃]) after coronals.
Vowels[]
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i, ĩ | u, ũ |
| Close-mid | e, ẽ | o, õ |
| Open-mid | ɛ, ɛ̃ | ɔ, ɔ̃ |
| Open | a, ã | |
The tilde (˜) marks nasal vowels, though the Peki dialect lacks /õ/. Many varieties of Ewe lack one or another of the front mid vowels, and some varieties in Ghana have the additional vowels /ə/ and /ə̃/.
Ewe does not have a nasal–oral contrast in consonants. It does, however, have a syllabic nasal, which varies as [m n ŋ], depending on the following consonant, and which carries tone. Some authors treat this as a vowel, with the odd result that Ewe would have more nasal than oral vowels, and one of these vowels has no set place of articulation. If it is taken to be a consonant, then there would be the odd result of a single nasal consonant which could not appear before vowels. If nasal consonants are taken to underlie [b ɖ ɡ], however, then there is no such odd restriction; the only difference from other consonants being that only nasal stops may be syllabic, a common pattern cross-linguistically.
Tones[]
Ewe is a tonal language. In a tonal language, pitch differences are used to distinguish one word from another. For example, in Ewe the following three words differ only in their tones:
- tó 'mountain' (High tone)
- tǒ 'mortar' (Rising tone)
- tò 'buffalo' (Low tone)
Phonetically, there are three tone registers, High, Mid, and Low, and three rising and falling contour tones. However, in most Ewe dialects only two registers are distinctive, High and Mid. These are depressed in nouns after voiced obstruents: High becomes Mid (or Rising), and Mid becomes Low. Mid is also realized as Low at the end of a phrase or utterance, as in the example 'buffalo' above.
In writing, tones are marked by acute accent, grave accent, caron, and circumflex. They may be used along with the tilde that marks nasal vowels.
Pragmatics[]
Ewe has phrases of overt politeness, such as meɖekuku (meaning "please") and akpe (meaning "thank you").