बासा

Bassa (Bassa wuɖu, autonymously "Bassa speech") is the largest of the Eastern Kru languages of Niger-Congo, the principal language of coastal Liberia's Bassa County. The Vah script — a unique indigenous syllabic-alphabetic script developed by Liberian Bassa scholar Thomas Narven Lewis around 1907 — is used as a cultural and identity marker, though Latin is dominant in everyday writing. Bassa shows classical Kru features: 7-vowel system, simple tone system (high/mid/low), and verbs marking aspect through suffix tonal changes. Bassa was the principal language of pre-colonial coastal Liberia and remains influential in Liberian English/Pidgin via lexical contributions.