First Steps: Writing the Kpelegbe (Ewe) Dictionary

Kpelegbe is a dialect of Ewe spoken in Togo on the road from Kpalime to Atakpame. I started learning Ewe in Togo the Peace Corps (1985-1987). Then, I wrote my thesis on the syntax of Kpelegbe (MIT, 1993):

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2020/12/topics-in-ewe-syntax-collins-1993.html

I followed up with a series of published papers on the syntax of Kpelegbe:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2020/12/argument-sharing-in-serial-verb.html

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2020/12/economy-of-derivation-and-generalized.html

At that time, my focus was purely on my thesis, which involved studies of Kpelegbe relevant to syntactic theory. The topics of my thesis where: secondary predicates, reflexes of successive cyclic movement and serial verbs. But I never published any descriptive materials, such as a dictionary, or a grammar, or a primer. 

In the meantime, since 1996 I have been invoved in a very intensive and rewarding project to document the Khoisan languages of southeastern Botswana. One product of this work is a dictionary of Sasi:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2024/07/writing-sasi-dictionary-some-personal.html

A more complete list of the dictionaries and grammars that I worked on is given here:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2024/12/my-khoisan-grammars-and-dictionaries.html

My work on Khoisan has given me the confidence and the skills to return to Kpelegbe to write a dictionary. When I was in Togo doing fieldwork in 1990, I put together a preliminary trilingual word list (Kplegbe-English-French) having over 700 words. These words were all accurately transcribed phonetically, including tonal transcriptions. The original word list was handwritten. I have since had it scanned. Then I typed it all up in a Word document.

Although I recorded some of the words in my original word list in 1990, I foolishly did not record the whole list. I only recorded enough to illustrate the main tonal contrasts. Since that time, my philosophy of fieldwork has completely changed so that now I insist on recording every single word or sentence that I elicit. In the case of a dictionary, I usually try to record with multiple male and female speakers in order to get a realistic idea of the range of pronunciations. Generally, I follow these guidelines for recording:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2021/10/audio-recording-fieldwork-session.html

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2017/04/recording-onto-your-computer.html

With this in mind, I went back to Togo in June-July 2025. For half of June, I taught a course on syntax at the University of Lome. The remainder of the time I spent in Agbanon (a village in Kpele) recording all the words in my original word list with two males and three females. I also added new words to the word list, and recorded and transcribed example sentences for some of the lexical entries.

When I got back to the US in August 2025, I gave the Word file to Zach, who transferred it into FLEx. Using the send/receive function, he sent me the resulting FLEx file. This FLEx word list is now the foundation of my present work on the Kpelegbe dictionary.

Putting the dictionary in FLEx has allowed me to clean it up quite a bit. For example, I went through the words that did not have a “part of speech” and added that information. I also made sure that all the “Notes” were written in the same style. Writing a dictionary involves hundreds of technical decisions and thousands of minor corrections to lexical entries. It is very time consuming and demands high levels of attention to detail. The job is made much easier by using FLEx.

Having a FLEx version also allowed me (once again with Zach’s help) to produce a rough draft of a formatted dictionary which I can present to the community as work-in-progress when I go back. Producing this formatted version has prompted me to think about readability issues. One huge difference between Sasi and Kpelegbe is that Ewe has a long history of standard orthography, which Sasi does not have. Therefore, it makes sense to try to make the Kpelegbe orthography as similar to the standard Ewe orthography as possible. These issues become very clear when looking at the draft version of the dictionary.

I am now preparing to go back to Togo in June-July 2026 to continue to work on the dictionary. Using various techniques, I believe I can get the dictionary up to 1,500 words by summer of 2026. One technique I am planning to use is to give the draft of the dictionary to several people in the community and ask them to read it over in order to suggest new words. Since many of them know how to write standard Ewe, they can write the suggestions in a notebook with a preliminary definition. Then I can work with them to add the new words to the dictionary. 

At the same time that I have been working on the Kpelegbe dictionary this year, I have also been working on digitizing my cassettes of Kpelegbe oral texts. In 1990, digital recording was not as common or as convenient as it is today. So I had 12 cassettes of oral texts, but I could not easily work with them because they were not digital. I made three trips to Daniel’s lab this year to use his equipment to digitize the cassettes. My next step is to match these sound files with transcriptions of the texts that I had made in 1990, and to transfer those oral texts into my FLEx project. I will work on this part of the project in summer 2026.

These oral texts are an integral part of the dictionary project. From working with Sasi, I learned that a great source of dictionary examples can be the oral texts uploaded to FLEx. I found hundreds of my Sasi dictionary examples in this way, and I plan to repeat the process with Kpelegbe.

There are over 700 words in my Kpelegbe dictionary today. I believe that with two more years of work (summer 2026 and sabbatical 2027-2028), I will be able to create a dictionary with a minimum of 3,000 entries. Unlike Sasi, Kpelgbe has many speakers of various age levels who still use Kpelegbe on a daily basis.

The Kpelegbe dictionary will feed into my eventual goal of writing a comprehensive Kpelegbe grammar:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2024/07/book-proposal-grammar-of-kpele-dialect.html

Furthermore, my work on the Kpelegbe dictionary and grammar will feed into proposed work on an online Ewe dialect map:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2024/05/proposal-ewe-dialect-map-ee-ktagbewo-e.html

I plan to spend the next few years of my career documenting Kpelegbe using the skills that I learned through documenting the Khoisan languages. In this way, I am completing the circle that begin with me learning Ewe as a Peace Corps volunteer.