A Grammar of Kusaal: A Mabia (Gur) Language of Northern Ghana

Abstract

The Gur languages (called Voltaic in the French tradition) form a huge language family within the Niger-Congo phylum. The family includes more than 70 languages spoken mainly in southeastern Mali, Burkina Faso, northern Benin, Nigeria, northern Togo, northern Ghana and northern Ivory Coast. While the position of some subgroups of the family, e. g. Senufo and some isolated languages, has recently been called into question, the languages of Central Gur undeniably form a tightly connected unit. Languages of this subgroup have similar phonological and tonal systems of two or three tones, and they share some grammatical features such as SVO constituent order, so-called “noun classes”, serial verb constructions and other multiverb predicates and coordinate constructions. Central Gur languages generally have a distinction between groups of stative and dynamic verbs, and aspect is important in the verbal system, marked with suffixes on the verb itself, whereas tense is marked by means of preverbal particles or auxiliaries. Research on Gur languages is growing, albeit slowly; however good descriptions taking into account all levels of the language are still scarce. Therefore, any effort to write a grammar of a Gur language is highly appreciated. The book under review is one of the rare grammars of a Central Gur language undertaken by a mother tongue speaker. In the following, I give a synopsis of the contents of this book, including my own analysis of remarkable and intriguing issues.