Kru

An insatiable appetite for ancient and modern tongues

Overview and Distribution. Kru languages constitute a small family within the very large Niger-Congo phylum. Spoken by about 3 million people in the forest regions of southern Liberia and south-west Ivory Coast, they were one of the first African languages met by Europeans, though only recently they have been systematically studied.

External Classification: Niger-Congo, Volta-Congo, Kru.

Internal Classification:

Kru languages are divided into Eastern and Western groups plus some isolates.

Oldest Documents

-A Kru word list appeared in Language de Guynée, a French manuscript of 1540.

-A few Kru languages were included in W. Koelle’s Polyglotta Africana published in 1854.

SHARED FEATURES

✦ Phonology
-Vowel system: The typical vowel system of Kru languages has four front vowels, four back vowels and a central one.

-Vowel harmony: In Kru languages there is a contrast between vowels pronounced with an advanced tongue root (+ATR) and a retracted tongue root (-ATR): only vowels from (+ATR) set or from (-ATR) set appear in the same morpheme.

-Consonants. Stops are articulated at five different points: bilabial, alveolar, palatal, velar and labio-velar.

-Tones: Kru languages have three or four tones which serve to make lexical or grammatical distinctions (number, definiteness, verbal aspect).

-Syllables: Open syllables (ending in a vowel) are predominant. Most words are monosyllabic or disyllabic.

✦ Morphology
-Many grammatical features, like plurality and aspect, are marked by suffixes.

-In some Kru languages there are remnants of a noun-class system similar to that of Bantu languages except that in them suffixes are used instead of prefixes.

-The verbal system is based more on aspect than tense. Imperfective and perfective are marked by suffixes; progressive, perfect and conditional are often marked by an auxiliary verb.

✦ Syntax
- The basic word order is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), but when an auxiliary verb is present it changes to S-AUX-O-V.

-Noun-modifiers (adjectives, articles, etc) usually follow their heads and direction is indicated by body parts placed also after the noun. In contrast, possessives and genitives precede their nouns.