Vagla language

Vagla is a Gurunsi (Gur) language of Ghana with about 14,000 speakers. It is spoken in a number of communities around the western area of Northern Region, Ghana. Such communities includes: Bole, Sawla, Tuna, Soma, Gentilpe, and Nakwabi. The people who speak this language are known as Vaglas, one of the indigenous tribes around that part of the Northern Region, which were brought under the Gonja local administration system "Gonjaland" by British Colonial Rulers under their Centralised System of Governance.

Phonology

Consonants

Consonants
	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labial- velar	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p	t	c	k	kp
voiced	b	d	ɟ	g	gb
Nasal	m	n	ɲ	ŋ	ŋm
Fricative	voiceless	f	s				h
voiced	v	z
Approximant		l	j		w

Vowels

Vowels
	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Close-mid	ɪ		ʊ
Mid	e		o
Open-mid	ɛ	(ʌ)	ɔ
Open		a

Blench uses /ʌ/, which is described as a -ATR counterpart of /a/.
All vowels can be long or short. Two similar vowels are not treated as a long vowel due to tone patterns.

Tones

Vagla has four tones: rising, falling, and two level tones. It also has downstep. Nasals and laterals can also carry tones.

Orthography

Vagla uses ⟨i⟩ to represent both /i/ and /ɪ/, and it uses ⟨u⟩ to represent /u/ and /ʊ/.

Nasalization is represented by a following ⟨h⟩, e.g., sɛɛ 'to agree' and sɛɛh 'to carve'.

Notes

Blench, Roger (2003). (PDF). Cahiers Voltaïques. 6: 17–31. (PDF) from the original on 20 April 2015.
Crouch, Marjory; Naden, Anthony (1998). "A semantically-based grammar of Vagla". Gur Papers (Special issue I). Bayreuth: University of Bayreuth. OCLC .