Jabo

Jabo may refer to:

People

West Africa

See also

Jabo people

Jabo (pronounced [ɟʱɑbo], variant spellings Dyabo, Djabo) is the self-designation of an ethnic group located in the southeastern part of the Republic of Liberia in West Africa. They have also sometimes referred to themselves as Gweabo or Nimiah tribe.

English speakers also use the name of the group for a single member of that group, or for their speech variety.

Tribe

Like many of their neighbors in the area, the Jabo have very pronounced ethnocentric attitudes, and are frequently referred to both by themselves and by others as a tribe, a term that in Liberia has a meaning imprecise at best. Confusion may arise due to the circumstance that in Liberia the English word "tribe" is also sometimes applied to the second-order administrative "districts," which are not necessarily congruent with "tribes" defined in local ethnotaxonomic terms. "Tribe" is also occasionally used for a third-order administrative "clan" when the latter comprises multiple ethnic clans, as well as for a variety of other more or less ad hoc groups.

Jabo language

The Jabo language is a Kru language spoken by the Jabo people of Liberia. They have also been known in the past as the Gweabo.

Classification

Jabo is part of the Grebo language continuum, encoded by Ethnologue more specifically as a dialect of the Southern Grebo language. However, Jabo satisfies the ISO 639-3 criteria for an individual language: