ABSTRACT
There are resident Wangara or Dyula communities, but their language, unlike the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso Dioula (Jula) is of no importance as a lingua franca, except possibly around Wa and the larger centres of western Brong-Ahafo near the Ivory Coast border. There are also communities of speakers of various Togolese languages, such as Tern (Kotokoli) and Chamba-Bassari, with occasional Ghanaian second-language speakers. Note that the Dyula language belongs to the Mande branch of Niger-Congo, while Moore, Tern and Bassari are fairly closely related to each other as members of the Central branch of Gur. Dogon has also been classified as Gur, but is very distantly related to the others. Fulani belongs to the West Atlantic branch of Niger-Congo, and Igbo and Y oruba are clearly related to the Niger-Congo languages of both northern and southern Ghana. All of these languages therefore are ultimately related, however distantly, but Songhai (Zabarima) is classified as belonging to Nilo-Saharan, which is an entirely different language family, not related to the other at all.
