UCLA sometimes gets requests for information on the Ewe language, spokenin southern Togo and eastern Ghana. UCLA does not teach Ewe and currentlyproduces no material on the language. It seems that little if anything hasbeen recently published on Ewe. I am familiar with the materials below,which still may be available from the original publishers or in libraries.
I would appreciate any additions to this list which we can add as a serviceto those making queries in the future. Please e-mail information to
The Experiment in International Living
Box 676
Kipling Road
Brattleboro, VT 05301
These books are nicely done, with lots of drawings. The first is laidout in terms of lessons on culture. The second has description of basicgrammar structures and drills. Neither book marks tone, which is a big drawback,but students could add tones as they went through with a native speaker.There are no tapes for these that I know of.
I have seen this book and accompanying tapes referenced at
http://www.llc.washington.edu/tapelists/tapes_e/ewe.html
I do not know whether this book is still available from IU. It seemsto have undergone several revisions. There is a set of tapes, which I thinkyou can still obtain from the IU language laboratory. The tapes do not exactlymatch the book I have, though when we were using these materials in classesat UCLA, I was able to use the books and tapes by finding where the matcheswere and transcribing the tapes when they didn't match. This is a very hardcore mim/mem pattern drill book, dry as dust, very short on useful culturalinformation, and not particularly well-conceived overall, but still usefulfor practicing basic structures.
I picked this up in Togo. I don't know who published it. I got it inthe office of the Comité de la Langue Ewe at the university in Lome.I don't have tapes for it. It is pretty dry and kind of strangely laid out,but I think it could be used to advantage with a teacher.
At UCLA, we began developing some computerized interactive exercisesfor Ewe. We did not get far with these, and they are extremely crude. However,they could prove useful for some basic sentence frames and pronunciation.Use of the exercises requires a Macintosh computer and Hypercard 2.1or higher. I make no guarantees about bugs or smoothness of operation. Iwill supply these free of charge to anyone who provides six 1 MB floppydisks or on 100 MB Zip disk. Send disks, preformatted for the Macintosh,to
Russell G. Schuh
Department of Linguistics
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
Here is an example from one of the exercises. Click on the ballons tohear a greeting and response.
The grammar is a useful reference grammar, but you could not use it asa pedagogical grammar. The dictionary is wonderful. It is very accessible,pretty complete at the elementary-intermediate level, and it is absolutelyaccurate. Everything is tone marked. I assume the same would be true forthe Ewe-English counterpart. Westermann's magnum opus on Ewe is his Ewe-Germandictionary, but it is extremely difficult to use, even if you know German.It would certainly not be good except for the most advanced students.
The Ghana Language Board has produced series of elementary school booksfor several Ghanaian languages. They are quite useful even for learnersof the language. They have lots of colorful pictures and simple little storiesin which the grammar structures and vocabulary are quite limited. The elementaryseries is called
Nunyamo
which means 'Way of Knowledge'.