Dan Language Alphabet (Yacouba, Gio)

Dan is a Mande language of the forest and mountains where Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia and Guinea meet. Its speakers call themselves Dan; in Côte d'Ivoire the people and the language are also widely known as Yacouba, and in Liberia as Gio. It is written in the Latin alphabet, but A–Z is not enough for it: Eastern Dan has twelve basic oral vowels, and some Dan varieties are described with five tone levels that can distinguish words.

The extra letters come from the phonetic alphabet, the same way many West African languages fill the gap: Ɛ ɛ and Ɔ ɔ for the open e and open o, and Ɯ ɯ, Ɤ ɤ and Ʌ ʌ for three unrounded back vowels, made without rounding the lips. Among the consonants Dan has the implosive Ɓ ɓ, and the labial-velar sounds kp and gb, made at the lips and the back of the mouth at the same time, which are written as pairs of plain letters as everywhere in the region.

Dan has been written in more than one spelling. Linguists' dictionaries, school and church materials in Côte d'Ivoire and the Liberian tradition do not all agree on how to write the extra vowels or how much tone to mark. The letters on this page are the ones Dan is described with in phonetic and dictionary writing; when you copy a word, match the spelling of the text it comes from.

Eastern Dan vowels: what ɛ, ɔ, ɯ, ɤ and ʌ stand for

The page shows ten vowel symbols from the broader Eastern Dan inventory, which has twelve oral vowels: i, e, ɛ, æ, ɯ, ɤ, ʌ, a, u, o, ɔ and ɒ. Of these, u, o and ɔ are rounded back vowels, while ɯ, ɤ and ʌ are unrounded back vowels. Plain e and o are close-mid, like French é and the o of French beau, while ɛ is the open e of English bed and ɔ the open o of British law.

The middle column is what makes Dan stand out. ɯ is the unrounded back close counterpart of u; ɤ is the unrounded back close-mid counterpart of o; ʌ is an open-mid back unrounded vowel like the one in English but. This series is unusual among European languages, which is why Dan writers need three letters that no ordinary keyboard carries. Dan also has nasal vowels, and in writing a vowel is doubled to show that it is long, as in the name of the Eastern Dan variety Gwɛɛtaa.

Look-alikes are easy to confuse here. Ɛ is not the Greek epsilon ε, Ɔ is not the reversed c ↄ, ʌ is not the Greek capital lambda Λ or the caret ^, and ɤ, called the rams horn, is not the Greek gamma γ or the Latin ɣ of Kpelle and Ewe. Copy them from the grid, and they will sort, search and print as the right letters.

Eastern Dan tone levels and how they are marked

Santa Dan (Dan-Gwɛɛtaa) has traditionally been described as contrasting five level tones: extra-high, high, mid, low and extra-low. Thomas Bearth and Hugo Zemp published that analysis in 1967, and it is often cited as a classic five-level tone analysis; later work analyzes Dan-Gblewo as four pitch levels plus creaky voice.

In the 2014 Eastern Dan orthography, the five level tones are marked with these accents over the vowel: double acute for extra-high a̋, acute for high á, macron for mid ā, grave for low à and double grave for extra-low ȁ. The same marks go on the special vowels, ɛ̋ ɛ́ ɛ̄ ɛ̀ ɛ̏ or ʌ̋ ʌ́ ʌ̄ ʌ̀ ʌ̏. They are combining characters: type or paste the vowel first and the mark straight after it, and the two join into one letter on screen. Everyday spellings mark tone less fully than dictionaries do.

How to type ɛ, ɔ, ɤ and the other Dan letters

On a Windows PC in Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 025B ɛ, 0190 Ɛ, 0254 ɔ, 0186 Ɔ, 026F ɯ, 019C Ɯ, 0264 ɤ, A7CB Ɤ, 028C ʌ, 0245 Ʌ, 0253 ɓ and 0181 Ɓ. For tones, type the vowel, then 030B, 0301, 0304, 0300 or 030F and Alt+X. On a Mac, switch to the Unicode Hex Input keyboard and hold Option while typing the same four-digit codes.

For typing in every program, install a keyboard layout for West African or phonetic letters, for example through Keyman, or an IPA keyboard. On a phone, add a keyboard app that supports African languages or IPA, or save the letters from this page as text replacements. In HTML, write ɛ for ɛ, ɔ for ɔ, ɯ for ɯ, ɤ for ɤ, ʌ for ʌ and ɓ for ɓ.

Fonts are the last hurdle. The small letters live in Unicode's IPA Extensions block and most fonts have them, but the capital Ɤ was added to Unicode decades after the small ɤ, and many fonts still show it as an empty box. Check a capital Ɤ before you print a title in it.

Where Dan is spoken: Yacouba in Côte d'Ivoire, Gio in Liberia

Unicode's CLDR estimates about 1.6 million Dan speakers: about 1.2 million in western Côte d'Ivoire 🇨🇮, around the city of Man and the towns of Danané and Biankouma, and about 430,000 in Liberia 🇱🇷, mostly in Nimba County, where the Gio live next to their Mano neighbours. Man sits among the mountains of the Dix-Huit Montagnes, and the Dan country reaches up to the Nimba range on the border with Guinea.

Dan belongs to the southern branch of the Mande family, with Mano, Tura, Guro, Mwan, Wan and Beng; Goo, Mano and Toura are among its closest relatives. It is only distantly related to the Manding languages, Bambara and Dioula, which have their own pages. In Côte d'Ivoire Dan lives next to French, Baoulé and Dioula, and the Côte d'Ivoire collection gathers the country's flag, emoji and letters; in Liberia it lives next to Liberian English and Kpelle, collected on the Liberia page.

Outside West Africa the name Dan is best known from art. Dan masks, carved wooden faces with calm, polished features, are among the best-known works of African sculpture, and the large carved ladles the Dan give to the most hospitable woman of a village are in many museums. On a phone the nearest emoji is 🎭.