Aja

Aja (autonymously Ajagbe) is a Gbe language of the Niger-Congo family, spoken by around 600,000 people in southwestern Benin and adjacent eastern Togo. The Aja are historically the "ancestral" Gbe people from whom the Fon (Dahomey) and Ewe (Ghana/Togo) migrated southward in the 17th century — Aja is therefore considered closer to the original Proto-Gbe homeland than the more southerly Fon and Ewe varieties. The Aja Kingdom of Tado was a major precolonial state in the Gulf of Benin region. Linguistically, Aja is part of the Gbe dialect continuum with Ewe (ee) and Fon (fon), with significant mutual intelligibility for closely related dialects but a distinct identity. The 17th-century Allada and Dahomey kingdoms have Aja roots even though their dynastic language eventually shifted to Fon.