Mpre is a language spoken or once spoken in the village of Butie in Ghana, near the confluence of the Black and White Voltas. It is known only from a 70-word list given in a 1931 article. It bears no close resemblance to its neighbors; it may be a Niger-Congo language, or a language isolate.
Bibliography
Cardinall, A.W. 1931. "A survival". Gold Coast Review, V,1:193-197.
External links
Blench, Roger (1999) Recent Field Work in Ghana: Report on Dompo and a note on Mpre (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/roger_blench/Language%20data/Dompo%20and%20Mpre.pdf).
Language is fluid, yes, and rules are made to be broken-- but they ought to be broken intelligently.
Introducing people to the idea that the ultimate authority for language is the speakers themselves too early can lead to a breakdown of the common medium for communication, as students find justification for not bothering to learn the accepted conventions.
Language develops and functions in the tension between its tendency to change over time (sometimes quite rapidly within small groups, such as teenagers) and the need for it to remain static enough to be understood over geographical or temporal distances.
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