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Nafaanra (sometimes written Nafaara, pronounced ) is a Senufo language spoken in northwest Ghana, along the border with Ivory Coast, east of Bondoukou. It is spoken by approximately 61,000 people.〔Ghana Institute for Linguistics, Literacy, and Bible Translation (GILLBT) 2003, as cited in Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. (Nafaanra: a language of Ghana. ) Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Retrieved on 2007-04-10〕 Its speakers call themselves Nafana; others call them Banda or Mfantera. Like other Senufo languages, Nafaanra is a tonal language. It is somewhat of an outlier in the Senufo language group, with the geographically closest relatives, the Southern Senufo Tagwana–Djimini languages, approximately to the west, on the other side of Comoé National Park. The basic word order is subject–object–verb, similar to Latin and Japanese. Like other Niger–Congo languages it has a noun class system where nouns are classified according to five different genders, which also affects pronouns, adjectives and copulas. The phonology features a distinction between the length of vowels and whether they are oral or nasal (as in French or Portuguese). There are also three distinct tones, a feature shared with the other Senufo languages. Nafaanra grammar features both tense and aspect which are marked with particles. Numbers are mainly formed by adding cardinal numbers to the number 5 and by multiplying the numbers 10, 20 and 100. ==Geography and demography== Nafaanra is bordered by Kulango languages to the west, while Deg (a Gur language) and Gonja (Kwa) are found to the north and east. The closest eastern neighbour is the Mande language Ligbi, whose speakers are also called ''Banda'') which, like Nafaanra, is an outlier to its own family. Southeast and south of Nafaanra and Ligbi, the Akan language Abron (also Bron or Brong) is spoken. The Nafana people live in the north-west corner of the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana, concentrated mainly in Sampa (capital of the Jaman North district) and Banda. There are two dialectal variants of Nafaanra: Pantera of Banda, and Fantera of Sampa.〔Jordan 1980:1〕 Bendor-Samuel gives a 79% cognate relationship on the Swadesh list between the two dialects, meaning that they have many basic words in common.〔Bendor-Samuel 1971〕 The Banda dialect is considered central. The terms "Fantera" and "Pantera" come from other peoples and are considered pejorative by the Nafana.〔 The Nafana people say that they come from a village called Kakala in Ivory Coast. Their oral history says that some of their people are still there, and if they go back they will not be allowed to leave again.〔Jordan 1978:84n1〕 They arrived in the Banda area after the Ligbi people, who came from Begho (Bigu, Bighu) to the area in the early 17th century.〔Stahl 2004〕 Many Nafana are bilingual in Twi, the regional lingua franca, to some extent. According to SIL, 50% of the people are able to "satisfy routine social demands and limited requirements in other domains", while 20% are able to speak Twi "with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, and occupational topics". The remaining 30% are either able to maintain only very simple face-to-face conversations on familiar topics (15%) or unable to speak Twi at all (15%). 15–25% of the Nafana people are literate in Twi, whereas only 1–5% are literate in Nafaanra.〔〔Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. (Introduction to the printed volume. ) Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Retrieved on 2007-04-10〕 Nafaanra is the second language of the approximately 70 Dompo people living in the close vicinity of Banda. Dompo is their first language, thought to be extinct until a field work trip of Blench in 1998 proved the contrary.〔Blench 1999〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nafaanra」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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