Editing Gbe languages (section)

===''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.