Kasena or Kassena (Kasem or Kassem) is the language of the Kassena ethnic group and is a Gur language spoken in the Upper East Region of northern Ghana and in Burkina Faso.
Kasena has three tones, a high tone, a mid level tone and a low tone. Tonal changes either change the lexical meaning of a word or its grammatical function.
Lexical
Grammatical
There are five classes of nouns that can be identified in Kasena. These classes correspond to grammatical genders and are differentiated in terms of number, such that there are five classes for singular nouns and five classes for plural nouns.
There are two classes of personal pronouns. One class is referring to humans, whereas the other class is referring to non-human entities. The personal pronouns are also used as possessive pronouns, thus there is no special form for possessive pronouns in Kasena.
Human personal pronouns
Non-human personal pronouns
Reciprocity is expressed by the pronoun daanê, which sometimes occurs as a prefix or suffix.
Reflexivity is expressed by a personal pronoun to which either têtê or katê ('-self')is added.
Relative pronouns are formed on the basis of the personal pronouns for non-human entities to which the suffix -lÃÂ is attached.
The Kasena language has a basic SVO word order.