In the first half of the twentieth century, the Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann was one of the most prolific contributors to the study of Gbe.

In Benin, Aja (740,000 speakers) and Fon were two of the six national languages selected by the government for adult education in 1992.

The dialect continuum as a whole was called 'Ewe' by Westermann, the most influential researcher on the cluster, who used the term 'Standard Ewe' to refer to the written form of the language.

[5] Ketu, settlement in present-day Benin Republic (formerly known as Dahomey), might be an appropriate starting point for a brief history of the Gbe-speaking peoples.

It is believed that the inhabitants of Ketu were pressed westward by a series of wars between the tenth and the thirteenth century.

[citation needed] Attacks between the thirteenth and the fifteenth century drove a large section of the group still further westward.

Tado is also the origin of the Aja people; in fact, the name Aja-Tado (Adja-Tado) is frequently used to refer to their language.

[6] Little is known of the history of the Gbe languages during the time that only Portuguese, Dutch and Danish traders landed on the Gold Coast (roughly 1500 to 1650).

The trade of mostly gold and agricultural goods did not exercise much influence on social and cultural structures of the time.

The Gbe language used in this document is thought to be a somewhat mangled form of Gen.[8] The relatively peaceful situation was profoundly changed with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, which reached its peak in the late eighteenth century when as many as 15,000 slaves per year were exported from the area around Benin as part of a triangular trade between the European mainland, the west coast of Africa and the colonies of the New World (notably the Caribbean).

The main actors in this process were Dutch (and to a lesser extent English) traders; captives were supplied mostly by cooperating coastal African states.

The Bight of Benin, precisely the area where the Gbe languages are spoken, was one of the centers of the slave trade at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Several wars (sometimes deliberately provoked by European powers in order to divide and rule) further distorted social and economical relations in the area.

In 1857, the first Ewe grammar, Schlüssel der Ewesprache, dargeboten in den Grammatischen Grundzügen des Anlodialekts, was published by missionary J.

Five different dialects of Gbe (at that time called the Ewé Language-Field) were already distinguished by Schlegel, notes Robert Needham Cust in his Modern Languages of Africa (1883).

Where previous literature consisted mostly of travel journals sometimes accompanied by short word lists, Schlegel's work marked the beginning of a period of prolific lexicographic and linguistic research into the various Gbe languages.

Important writers of this period include Johann Gottlieb Christaller (Die Volta-Sprachen-Gruppe, 1888), Ernst Henrici (Lehrbuch der Ephe-Sprache, 1891, actually the first comparative Gbe grammar), J. Knüsli (Ewe-German-English Vocabulary, 1892) and Maurice Delafosse (Manuel Dahoméen (Fon), 1894).

In 1902 the missionary Diedrich Hermann Westermann contributed an article titled "Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Yewe-Sprachen in Togo" to Zeitschrift für Afrikanische und Oceanische Sprachen.

A significant exception is formed by the extensive comparative linguistic research of Hounkpati B Christophe Capo, which resulted in an internal classification of the Gbe languages and a reconstruction of the proto-Gbe phonology.

Synchronised linguistic research carried out in the course of this study shed more light on the relations between the various varieties of Gbe.

[10] In general, the SIL studies corroborated many of Capo's findings and led to adjustment of some of his more tentative groupings.

Capo (1981) has argued that nasalization in Gbe languages should be analyzed phonemically as a feature relevant to vowels and not to consonants.

The basic syllable form of Gbe languages is commonly rendered (C1)(C2)V(C3), meaning that there at least has to be a nucleus V, and that there are various possible configurations of consonants (C1-3).

In some cases the nominal prefix is reduced to schwa or lost: the word for 'fire' is izo in Phelá, ədʒo in Wací-Ewe and dʒo in Pecí-Ewe.

The basic word order of Gbe clauses is generally subject–verb–object, except in the imperfective tense and some related constructions.

Other tenses are arrived at by means of special time adverbs or by inference from the context, and this is where the tense/aspect distinction becomes blurred.

ŋútsumanáDETaFUTɸlèbuyxéxíumbrellaŋútsu á a ɸlè xéxíman DET FUT buy umbrella'the man will buy an umbrella' (Ewegbe, future marker)ŋútsumanáDETɸlèbuy:PFVxéxíumbrellaŋútsu á ɸlè xéxíman DET buy:PFV umbrella'the man bought an umbrella' (Ewegbe, perfective)Focus, which is used to draw attention to a particular part of the utterance, to signify contrast or to emphasize something, is expressed in Gbe languages by leftward movement of the focused element and by way of a focus marker wɛ́ (Gungbe, Fongbe), yé (Gengbe) or é (Ewegbe), suffixed to the focused element.

àxwéhouseyéFOCKòfíKofitùbuild:PFVàxwé yé Kòfí tùhouse FOC Kofi build:PFV'Kofi built A HOUSE' (Gengbe, focus)Questions can be constructed in various ways in Gbe languages.