Kusaal is a Gur language spoken primarily in northern eastern Ghana, and Burkina Faso.
There is a distinctive dialect division between Agole, to the East of the Volta River, and Toende, to the West.
Kusaal shows the typical Gur feature whereby the noun and adjective stems are compounded in that order, followed by the singular/plural endings: bupielig(a) "white goat" [ bu-(g(a)) + piel- + -g(a) ] bupielis(e) "white goats" There are a few traces of the old system (as in Gurmanche) whereby the adjective took the singular/plural endings appropriate to the class of the preceding noun, but the system is completely unproductive in Kusaal now.
(d) -in subjunctive for irrealis : Fu yaʼa gosin ... "If you were to look (but you won't) ..." (e) -b(o), -g(o), -r(e) gerund, verbal noun: o gosig la mor dabiem "his (the angel's) appearance was scary" [Judges 13:6 draft] - literally 'his seeing they had fear' Some 10% of verbs, with stative meanings, have only a single form.
The verb is preceded by a chain of invariable particles expressing tense, polarity and mood.
Within the noun phrase, except for the typical noun-adjective Gur compounding, the rule is that associative modifier (possessive, genitive) precedes the head: m buug "my goat" la nobir "the goat's foot" (la "the", follows its noun) Numeral and deictics (demonstrative, article) follow, with the quantitative in final place: m buus atanʼ la wusa "all my three goats" The sound system of Kusaal is similar to that of its relatives; consonant clusters (except between adjacent words) occur only word-internally at morpheme-junctures and are determined by the limited range of consonants which can appear in syllable-final position.
Clusters arising from the addition of suffixes in derivation and flexion are either simplified or broken up by inserted ("svarabhakti") vowels.
The roster of consonants includes the widespread West African labiovelar double-closure stops kp, gb, but the palatal series of the related languages (written ch/j in Dagbani and Hanga and ky/gy in Mampruli) fall in with the simple velars, as in neighbouring Farefare (Frafra, Gurene) and Moore.
The orthography used above is basically that of the New Testament translation, which remained the only substantial written work available in Kusaal for a long time.
The New Testament orthography, however, spells "goat" boog, and the vowel is intermediate between u and o, phonetic [ʊ].
It is adequate for mother-tongue speakers but does not suffice to distinguish the seven distinct vowel qualities of Agole Kusaal, does not mark tone, and has partly inconsistent word-division conventions due to the complications produced by the Kusaal final vowel loss/reduction phenomena.
Since 2013, however, a unified orthography[2] of the language has been in use and is used across various sectors including education at the University of Education, Winneba (Ajumako campus) and by translators who recently (2015) succeeded in revising the New Testament as well as translating the complete Old Testament into the language using the set of guidelines provided in the current orthography.
Much grammatical information on the Burkina Faso dialect (Toende) is to be found in Niggli's primarily phonological work cited below.