A family of
languages in
West Africa, mainly in
Burkina Faso,
Ghana,
Togo,
Benin, and
Côte d'Ivoire. The family is also known (especially in French) as
Voltaic, from the
Volta River. (Burkina Faso was formerly called
Upper Volta.) The name Gur is derived from the fact that several languages in the group begin with this syllable:
Gurma,
Gurmanchema,
Gurenne,
Gurunsi.
The main national languages in the Gur family are Moré in Burkina Faso (the language of the majority Mossi people), Senufo in Guinea, Dagbara in Ghana, Dagaari in Ghana and Burkina Faso, and Lobi in Burkina Faso.
Gur is a branch of the Niger-Congo superbranch of the Niger-Kordofanian phylum. The (over-precise) Ethnologue database distinguishes 100 Gur languages. The name was proposed by Krause in 1895 and accepted by Westermann in 1927 as part of his classification of what he called West Sudanic languages, and then by Joseph Greenberg. In 1989 Bendor-Samuel removed the Dogon dialect cluster from the Gur group and elevated to a separate group of equal status.
Typology: SVO or SOV, postpositional, GN, NA.