Ansah, V.O.2021-05-052021-05-052019-07http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh/handle/123456789/36318PhD. LinguisticsStudies show that one quarter of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, yet most of these languages remain unstudied or not fully described (Blench 1998). This may have driven (Crystal 2000) to caution that most languages will be in extinction by 2020, hence the need for inter-generational transmission to help preserve them. One such means of preservation is documentation. Unfortunately, for Ɛsahie, a Kwa language with over 580,000 speakers (2010 National Population Census) located in the Western North Region of Ghana, not much documentation is available, compared to other languages such as Akan, Ewe, Ga and Nzema. Accordingly, using the qualitative research methodology, this study examines some phonological issues in the language. It investigates the principles that underlie and therefore regulate the organization of segments and prosodic units in Ɛsahie. The study discusses the inherent features of Ɛsahie speech sounds and the constraints on their distribution and sequencing, and establishes the repair strategies available in Ɛsahie for dealing with impermissible sound distributions and sequences. The study further examines the tonal structure of nouns and verbs, both in the basic forms and the non-basic forms. On nouns, the thesis establishes three tonal groups for basic nouns and examines the tonal structure of affixed nouns, deverbal nouns, and reduplicated nouns. The study shows that while nominal suffixes trigger tonal change in the base nouns, nominal prefixes do not. For verbs, the thesis looks at the tone of inflected as well as reduplicated verbs to identify the tonal processes that occur when tones interact and how they influence lexical and grammatical patterns in the language. It establishes three tonal groups for un-inflected verb forms in Ɛsahie. It further shows that tone influences the inflection of verbs in the language and that tone assignment varies, depending on the verb’s tense, aspect or mood but there is no attendant segmental alternation in the lexical verb. The study is based on data from both primary and secondary sources. The primary data is from field trips to some selected towns in the language community, while the secondary data is from literature written in the language. This thesis is instructional as it will add to the linguistic information available on Ɛsahie and contribute to our understanding of the segmental and prosodic systems of African languagesenƐsahieLanguageThesis