Dagaare is the maternal language of the Dagaaba people in Ghana and Burkina Faso. It has been described as a dialect continuum that also includes Waale and Birifor.
Ethnologue divides Dagaare into three languages:
- Southern Dagaare language (dga), which is spoken mainly in Ghana
- Northern Dagara language (dgi), which is spoken mainly in Burkina Faso
- Dagaari Dioula (dgd), which is spoken mainly in Burkina Faso, and has significant influence from the genetically unrelated Dioula language
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)