Editing Gbe languages (section)

==History==

===Before 1600===
[[Ketu (Benin)|Ketu]], settlement in present-day Benin Republic (formerly known as Dahomey), might be an appropriate starting point for a brief history of the Gbe-speaking peoples. Ewe traditions refer to Ketu as ''[[Amedzofe (history)|Amedzofe]]'' ("origin of humanity") or ''Mawufe'' ("home of the Supreme Being"). It is believed that the inhabitants of Ketu were pressed westward by a series of wars between the tenth and the thirteenth century. In Ketu, the ancestors of the Gbe-speaking peoples separated themselves from other refugees and began to establish their own identity.{{citation needed|date=December 2022}}

Attacks between the thirteenth and the fifteenth century drove a large section of the group still further westward. They settled in the ancient kingdom of [[Tado (state)|Tado]] (also Stado or Stádó) on the Mono river (in present-day [[Togo]]). The Tado kingdom was an important state in [[West Africa]] up to the late fifteenth century.{{citation needed|date=December 2022}}

In the course of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, the [[Notsé|Notsie]] (or Notsé, Notsye, Wancé) kingdom was established by emigrants from the Tado kingdom; Notsie would later (around 1500) become the home of another group of migrants from Tado, the [[Ewe people]]. Around 1550, emigrants from Tado established the [[Allada]] (or Alada) kingdom, which became the center of the [[Fon people]]. Tado is also the origin of the [[Aja people]]; in fact, the name Aja-Tado (Adja-Tado) is frequently used to refer to their language.
Aja is considered the mother tribe by the rest of Gbe speaking people as many of the tribes trace their migration routes through Aja Tado(formerly known as Azame).{{citation needed|date=December 2022}}

Other peoples that speak Gbe languages today are the [[Gen people]] (Mina, Ge) around [[Anexo]], who are probably of Ga and [[Fante people|Fante]] origin, and the [[Phla–Pherá languages|Phla and Pherá]] peoples, some of whom consist of the traditional inhabitants of the area intermingled with early migrants from Tado.<ref>Capo 1991:10; see also the section on linguistic diversity in [[Phla–Pherá languages#Linguistic diversity|Phla–Pherá languages]].</ref>

===European traders and the transatlantic slave trade===
[[Image:Doctrina Christiana - Y explicacion de sus Misterios en nuestro idiom Español, y en lengua Arda (first page).png|thumb|right|First page of the Spanish/Gen version of the 1658 ''Doctrina Christiana'']]

Little is known of the history of the Gbe languages during the time that only Portuguese, Dutch and Danish traders landed on the [[Gold Coast (British colony)|Gold Coast]] (roughly 1500 to 1650). The trade of mostly gold and agricultural goods did not exercise much influence on social and cultural structures of the time. No need was felt to investigate the indigenous languages and cultures; the languages generally used in trade at this time were [[Portuguese language|Portuguese]] and [[Dutch language|Dutch]]. Some [[loanword]]s remain from this period, for example ''atrapoe'' 'stairs'<ref>{{cite book| page=[https://archive.org/details/adictionaryasan00chrigoog/page/n635 603] |title=A Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi (Chwee, Tw̌i): With a Grammatical Introduction and Appendices on the Geography of the Gold Coast and Other Subjects |author=Johann Gottlieb Christaller |publisher=Evangelical Missionary Society |year=1881 |via=New York Public Library, Internet Archive|url=https://archive.org/details/adictionaryasan00chrigoog}}</ref> from Dutch ''trap'' and ''duku'' '(piece of) cloth' from Dutch ''doek'' or Danish ''dug''. The few written accounts that stem from this period focus on trade. As more European countries established trade posts in the area, [[missionary|missionaries]] were sent out. As early as 1658, Spanish missionaries translated the ''[[Doctrina Christiana]]'' into the language of [[Allada]], making it one of the earliest texts in any West African language. The Gbe language used in this document is thought to be a somewhat mangled form of [[Gen language|Gen]].<ref>This catechism was reprinted in Labouret & Rivet 1929, who also document the history of the Spanish mission in Allada or Arda.</ref>

The relatively peaceful situation was profoundly changed with the rise of the [[History of slavery|transatlantic slave trade]], which reached its peak in the late eighteenth century when as many as 15,000 slaves per year were exported from the area around Benin as part of a [[triangular trade]] between the European mainland, the west coast of Africa and the colonies of the [[New World]] (notably the Caribbean). The main actors in this process were [[Netherlands|Dutch]] (and to a lesser extent [[England|English]]) traders; captives were supplied mostly by cooperating coastal African states.

The [[Bight of Benin]], precisely the area where the Gbe languages are spoken, was one of the centers of the slave trade at the turn of the eighteenth century. The export of 5% of the population each year resulted in overall population decline. Moreover, since the majority of the exported captives were male, the slave trade led to an imbalance in the female/male ratio. In some parts of the [[Slave Coast of West Africa|Slave Coast]] the ratio reached two adult women for every man. Several wars (sometimes deliberately provoked by European powers in order to [[divide and rule]]) further distorted social and economical relations in the area. The lack of earlier linguistic data makes it difficult to trace the inevitable linguistic changes that resulted from this turbulent period.

===Colonisation and onwards===
Around 1850, the transatlantic slave trade had virtually ceased. As the grip of European colonial powers strengthened, slave raiding became prohibited, trading focused on goods once more and the Europeans took it to be their calling to Christianize the colonized parts of Africa. In 1847 the Norddeutsche Missions-Gesellschaft (Bremen) started its work in [[Keta]].

In 1857, the first Ewe grammar, ''Schlüssel der Ewesprache, dargeboten in den Grammatischen Grundzügen des Anlodialekts'', was published by missionary [[J. B. Schlegel]] of the Bremen mission. Five different dialects of Gbe (at that time called the ''Ewé Language-Field'') were already distinguished by Schlegel, notes [[Robert Needham Cust]] in his ''Modern Languages of Africa'' (1883).<ref>Cust, ''The Modern Languages of Africa'', p. 204.</ref> The dialects listed by Cust do not map exactly onto the five subgroups now distinguished by Capo, which is not too surprising since Cust himself admits that he relies on a multitude of often conflicting sources. Fon is in fact listed twice (once as 'the dialect of the province of Dahomé' and once as 'Fogbe').

Where previous literature consisted mostly of travel journals sometimes accompanied by short word lists, Schlegel's work marked the beginning of a period of prolific lexicographic and linguistic research into the various Gbe languages. Important writers of this period include [[Johann Gottlieb Christaller]] (''Die Volta-Sprachen-Gruppe'', 1888), [[Ernst Henrici]] (''Lehrbuch der Ephe-Sprache'', 1891, actually the first comparative Gbe grammar), J. Knüsli (''Ewe-German-English Vocabulary'', 1892) and [[Maurice Delafosse]] (''Manuel Dahoméen'' (Fon), 1894).

In 1902 the missionary [[Diedrich Hermann Westermann]] contributed an article titled "Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Yewe-Sprachen in Togo" to ''Zeitschrift für Afrikanische und Oceanische Sprachen''. Westermann became one of the most productive and influential writers on the Gbe languages, and his output dominated the Gbe literature and analysis of the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote mainly on the Western Gbe languages, especially on [[Ewe language|Ewe]] (though he often used the term 'Ewe' to denote the Gbe dialect continuum as a whole). Among his most important works on Ewe are his ''A Study of the Ewe language'' (1930) and ''Wörterbuch der Ewe-Sprache'' (1954).

===''Renaissance du Gbe''===

From 1930 on, publications on various Gbe languages appeared rapidly, the vast majority of them dealing with individual Gbe languages. A significant exception is formed by the extensive [[comparative linguistics|comparative linguistic]] research of [[Hounkpati B Christophe Capo]], which resulted in an internal classification of the Gbe languages and a reconstruction of the proto-Gbe [[phonology]]. Much of the comparative research for Capo's classification of the Gbe languages was carried out in the 1970s, and partial results were published in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the form of articles on specific [[phonology|phonological]] developments in various branches of Gbe and, notably, in the form of a unified standard orthography of Gbe. In his ''Renaissance du Gbe'' (1988), the internal classification of Gbe was published in full for the first time. In 1991, Capo published a comparative phonology of Gbe. In this period, Capo also initiated ''Labo Gbe (Int.)'', the 'Laboratory for research on Gbe languages', based in Benin, which has since fostered research and published several collections of papers on the Gbe languages.

In the early 1990s, [[SIL International]] initiated a study to assess which Gbe communities could benefit from existing [[literacy]] efforts and whether additional literacy campaigns in some of the remaining communities would be needed. Synchronised linguistic research carried out in the course of this study shed more light on the relations between the various varieties of Gbe.<ref>Some of the results of this study were presented in Kluge (2000, 2005, 2006).</ref> In general, the SIL studies corroborated many of Capo's findings and led to adjustment of some of his more tentative groupings.