Professor Adams Bodomo writes;

Dagaaba and Dagaare:

Dagaaba: a people who live in northwestern Ghana and adjacent parts of Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast. The vast majority of us are in Ghana, definitely.

The – ba suffix in this name signals the plural marker. So we are Dagaaba but I am a Dagao

As a Dagao, I speak Dagaare. The suffix – re here signals the language.

These suffixes and their various variants are quite rampant in other Mabia languages:

– ba can have variants like bɛ, ma, etc

– re can have variants like – ra, – li, – ni, – ne, etc

(A lot more research needs to go into understanding these affixal changes over time!!!)

So we have:
Dagaaba
Dagomba
Walba
Etc

These people speak:
Dagaare
Dagbane
Waale
Etc

Sometimes there are various mutations that give us variants like Waala instead of Walba or Dagara instead of Dagaare. This last case (change from – re to – ra) is what linguists call total vowel assimilation – the suffix vowel completely takes on the features of the root vowels.

From a formal linguistic point of view, Dagara is just a banal mutation from Dagaare or even Dagaaba.

But for over two decades or more now, this issue has been cashed on by some scholars of identity politics and the politicians behind such identity politics to cause division within our ethnic group.

Certainly, Dagara is a valid variant of Dagaare and Dagaaba and we can use it all right, but I propose that we all of this ethnic group accept that our main name is: DAGAABA! And the main name of our language is DAGAARE!

I am writing this because recently a bigot from southern Ghana has made a film titled Kofi Dagarti, intentionally referring to our ethnicity as Dagarti.

Dagarti is a clear misnormer, an intentionally derogatory term used by bigots mostly from southern Ghana (along with some ignorant Dagaaba who use it foolishly) against us.

Now, I have seen on social media various people fighting against this – and rightly so – but, in so doing, they keep writing “Dagara/ Dagaaba”.

This kind of framing weakens our case a lot. It looks like we can’t even decide who we are, what our name is, and what language we speak. Could it be an opportunistic and deceptive way of pretending to be fighting against the term Dagarti while indeed promoting the minor variant of our ethnic name and our language name instead of sticking to the main variants DAGAABA and DAGAARE?

Source: Upper West Media App