language who use the higher articulated . Allophonic variation based on tongue-root advancement is well attested for 4 of these vowels: ~ , ~ , ~ and ~ . Consonants [] mainly occurs phonemically among other Western dialects. debuccalizes as a glottal when in intervocalic position. debuccalizes as a glottal stop post-vocalic position. Sounds are realized as when preceding front vowels. can be heard as when in post-vocalic positions. Tone Dagbani is a tonal language in which pitch is used to distinguish words, as in gballi (high-high) 'grave' vs. gballi (high-low) 'zana mat'. The tone system of Dagbani is characterised by two level tones and downstep (a lowering effect occurring between sequences of the same phonemic tone). Grammar Dagbani is agglutinative, but with some fusion of affixes. The constituent order in Dagbani sentences is usually agent–verb–object. Lexicon There is an insight into a historical stage of the language in the papers of Rudolf Fisch reflecting data collected during his missionary work in the German Togoland colony in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially the lexical list, though there is also some grammatical information and sample texts. A more modern glossary was published in 1934 by a southern Ghanaian officer of the colonial government, E. Foster Tamakloe, in 1934, with a revised edition by British officer Harold Blair. Various editors added to the wordlist and a more complete publication was produced in 2003 by a Dagomba scholar, Ibrahim Mahama. According to the linguist Salifu Nantogma Alhassan, there is evidence to suggest that there are gender-related double standards in the Dagbani language with "more labels that trivialise females than males." Meanwhile, the data was electronically compiled by John Miller Chernoff and Roger Blench (whose version is published online), and converted to a database by Tony Naden, on the basis of which a full-featured dictionary is ongoing and can be viewed online. Noun Class System Pronouns Each set of personal pronouns in Dagbani is distinguished regarding person, number and animacy. Besides the distinction between singular and plural, there is an additional distinction between [+/- animate] in the 3rd person. Moreover, Dagbani distinguishes between emphatic and non-emphatic pronouns and there are no gender distinctions. While there is no morphological differentiation between grammatical cases, pronouns can occur in different forms according to whether they appear pre- or postverbally. Non-emphatic Pronouns Preverbal Preverbal pronouns serve as subjects of a verb and are all monosyllabic.