A Comparative Phonology of Gbe (Publications in African Languages and Linguistics, No 14).

Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "naturalness" of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.

Ghana has played a key role in African/Western relations since medieval times. For this reason and others, Ghana has evolved into a linguistic quilt that contains forty-four indigenous languages and several exotic ones, of which most Ghanians speak at least two. Using Accra, Ghana's capital, as a microcosm, Dakubu conducts a linguistic, historical, and ethnographic investigation of the origins and durability of this multilingualism and how it has effected Ghanaian society.

First published in 1988, this book provides an easily accessible handbook of knowledge about the languages of Ghana; their geographical distribution, their relationships with each other, the social patterns of their use, and their structures. Besides the general introduction, it contains chapters on each of the individually recognised families of languages spoken in Ghana: Gur, Volta-Comoé, Gbe, Ga-Dangme, Central-Tongo and Mande. An additional chapter outlines the use of non-indigenous languages in the country.