Grebo Alphabet

Grebo is written in Latin script, but its orthographies differ by variety and period. Innes’s 1967 dictionary uses Ɛ ɛ and Ɔ ɔ for open vowels; other documented Grebo orthographies use different vowel spellings. Where a system distinguishes these vowels, substituting plain e or o loses the distinction.

Like the other Kru languages of Liberia, Grebo has the double consonants kp and gb, a k or g said together with a p or b, lips and back of the tongue closing at once. They are written as two letters, as in the name of the Gboloo variety, so they need no special character. Glebo is the name used for the coastal, or “Seaside,” variety around Cape Palmas; Grebo is also used as the broader group name.

A common Grebo orthography writes some sounds with the digraphs ch, gb, kp, ngm and ny; q and x are not in its listed alphabet. Personal and place names are often written in their familiar Liberian English spellings.

Tone in Grebo and the tone letter ꞉

Grebo is a tonal language: the pitch of a syllable is part of the word, and two words can differ by tone alone. It became famous among linguists through the Jabo (Gweabo) variety, which Edward Sapir described in 1931 with four level tones, more than most languages of the world use.

Unicode's own notes for ꞉, the MODIFIER LETTER COLON (U+A789), name Grebo as one of the orthographies that use it as a tone letter. Unicode classifies ꞉ as a modifier symbol, despite the name MODIFIER LETTER COLON; it is a distinct character from the punctuation colon (:). If you copy Grebo text that contains it, keep the real ꞉ rather than retyping an ordinary colon :, which a computer treats as punctuation.

How to type ɛ and ɔ on a keyboard, iPhone or Android

The quickest way is to copy Ɛ ɛ Ɔ ɔ and ꞉ from this page. In Microsoft Word on Windows, type the code and press Alt+X: 025B for ɛ, 0190 for Ɛ, 0254 for ɔ, 0186 for Ɔ and A789 for ꞉. On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input source in Keyboard settings, then hold Option and type the same four-digit code. In HTML write ɛ for ɛ, Ɛ for Ɛ, ɔ for ɔ, Ɔ for Ɔ and ꞉ for ꞉.

Phone keyboards set to English do not offer ɛ or ɔ on a long-press, so set up text replacements once: on an iPhone in Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, on Android in your keyboard's personal dictionary or shortcuts. Paste ɛ as the phrase with a trigger such as ee3, and ɔ with oo3, and the letters appear as you type.

Watch the look-alikes: ɛ is not Greek ε (epsilon) and not Cyrillic є, and ɔ is not the reversed ↄ. They look right on screen but break searching and sorting in Grebo text.

Where the Grebo language is spoken

Grebo is the language of the Grebo people of southeastern Liberia, around Harper and Cape Palmas in Maryland County and in Grand Kru and River Gee counties, near the Cavalla River that forms the border with Côte d'Ivoire. Unicode's CLDR estimates about 540,000 speakers in Liberia, which makes Grebo one of the larger languages of the country.

Grebo is not one uniform language but a cluster: the ISO 639-3 standard treats it as a macrolanguage (code grb) with five members, Northern, Southern, Central, Gboloo and Barclayville Grebo. It belongs to the Kru branch of Niger–Congo, with Klao (Kru), Krahn and Bassa as relatives; Bassa also has a script of its own, Bassa Vah, in the Bassa collection. Many Grebo speakers also use English, and the Liberian English and Liberia collections have the country's flag, money and emoji.

Grebo was among the first languages of Liberia to be written down. In the 1830s American missionaries at Cape Palmas, among them John Leighton Wilson, put it into Latin letters and printed the first Grebo books, and church hymns and scripture in Grebo have been printed ever since.

Grebo masks, drums and the other "grebo"

Outside Liberia, many people meet the word through Grebo masks: carved wooden masks with rows of tubular, projecting eyes, made in Grebo and neighbouring Kru communities on both sides of the Liberia–Côte d'Ivoire border. Pablo Picasso owned Grebo masks, and their eyes standing out as cylinders are often cited as a source for his 1912 cardboard Guitar, whose sound hole projects forward instead of cutting in.

The Jabo Grebo were also the subject of George Herzog's classic study of drum and horn signalling 🥁, in which the instruments copy the tones of spoken words, and of Jabo Proverbs from Liberia (1936), which Herzog compiled with the Jabo scholar Charles Blooah.

If you were looking for grebo music or grebo fashion, that is a different word: British slang for the long-haired alternative rock scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s around bands such as Pop Will Eat Itself and The Wonder Stuff. It has nothing to do with the Grebo people or their language.