Dagaare
Native to	Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon
Ethnicity	Dagaaba people
Native speakers	(1.3 million cited 1999–2021)[1]
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Gur Northern Oti–Volta Moré–Dagbani Moré Dagaare
Dialects	Lober Nura Wule
Writing system	Latin (Dagaare alphabet) Dagaare Braille
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Variously: dga – Southern Dagaare dgd – Dagaari Dioula dgi – Northern Dagara
Glottolog	sout2789  Central Dagaare daga1272  Dagaari Dioula nort2780  Northern Dagara
Majority areas of Northern Dagara speakers, in red, on a map of Burkina Faso.

Dagaare is the language of the Dagaaba people of Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast. It has been described as a dialect continuum that also includes Waale and Birifor. Dagaare language varies in dialect stemming from other family languages including: Dagbane, Waale, Mabia, Gurene, Mampruli, Kusaal, Buli, Niger-Congo, and many other sub languages resulting in around 1.3 million Dagaare speakers.^[1] Throughout the regions of native Dagaare speakers the dialect comes from Northern, Central, Western, and Southern areas referring to the language differently. Burkina Faso refers to Dagaare as Dagara and Birifor to natives in the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire. The native tongue is still universally known as Dagaare. Amongst the different dialects, the standard for Dagaare is derived from the Central region's dialect. Southern Dagaare (or Waale) also stems from the Dagaare language and is known to be commonly spoken in Wa and Kaleo.

Ethnologue divides Dagaare into three languages:

• Southern/Central Dagaare language, which is spoken mainly in Ghana
• Northern Dagara language, which is spoken mainly in Burkina Faso
• Dagaari Dioula, which is spoken mainly in Burkina Faso, and has significant influence from the genetically unrelated Dioula language
  

  Distribution of Dagaree Speakers

Orthography

Tones are indicated using diacritics:

• the grave accent for the low tone: ⟨à è ɛ̀ ì ɩ̀ ò ɔ̀ ù ʋ̀⟩ ;
• the acute accent for the high tone: ⟨á é ɛ́ í ɩ́ ó ɔ́ ú ʋ́⟩ ;
• and no accent for the middle tone.

Nasalization is indicated using the tilde. A nasalized vowel in high or low tone is surmounted by the tilde under the accent.

Phonology

The consonant and vowel sounds in the Dagaare languages:

Vowels

Consonants

Allophones of /d, ɡ/ include .^[3][5][6]

Ghanaian Dagaare has twenty-five consonants and two glides (semi-vowels). Glottalized /ˀh/, /ˀl/, and /ˀm/ occur in the northern dialect of Burkina Faso.^[3]

Grammar

Tone

Dagaare is a tonal language with a two-level tone system with a downstep high tone. The Dagaare tone has two basic functions, namely a lexical and a grammatical function. Its lexical function concerns differences in lexical semantics, such that differing in tone but not in morphosyntactic form triggers different semantics. Its grammatical function is responsible for cases in which different tone markings on a segment result in different semantics of that expression.^[7]

Lexical function

Grammatical function

Noun class system