| Akan | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | ||
| Total speakers | 19 million | |
| Ranking | 79 | |
| Language family | Niger-Congo
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| Official status | ||
| Official language in | None. — Government-sponsored languages of Ghana |
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| Regulated by | Akan Orthography Committee | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | ak | |
| ISO 639-2 | aka | |
| ISO 639-3 | aka | |
| Linguasphere | ||
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Akan, or Twi-Fante, is the principal native language of Ghana, spoken over much of the southern half of that country, by about 40% of the population, and to a lesser extent across the border in eastern Côte d'Ivoire. Three dialects have been developed as literary standards with distinct orthographies, Asante, Akuapem (together called Twi), and Fante, which despite being mutually intelligible were inaccessible in written form to speakers of the other standards. In 1978 the Akan Orthography Committee established a common orthography for all of Akan, which is used as the medium of instruction in primary school by speakers of several other Akan languages such as Anyi, Sefwi, Ahanta (but not Nzema), as well as the Guang languages.
The Akan people speak the Akan languages (i.e. Central Tano), of which Akan proper is just one. Akan proper (Twi-Fante) consists of the following dialects:
The Bureau of Ghana Languages has compiled a unified orthography of 20,000 words.
The adinkra symbols are old ideograms.
The language came to the Caribbean and South America, notably in Suriname spoken by the Ndyuka and in Jamaica by the Jamaican Maroons known as Kromanti, with the slaves. The descendants of escaped slaves in the interior of Suriname and the Maroons in Jamaica still use a form of this language, including Akan naming convention, in which children are named after the day of the week on which they are born, e.g. Akwasi (for a boy) or Akosua (girl) born on a Sunday. In Jamaica and Suriname the Anansi spider stories are well known.
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According to work done by P K Agbedor of CASAS, Mfantse (Fante), Twi (Asante and Akuapem), Abron (Bono), Wassa, Asen, Akwamu, and Kwahu belong to Cluster 1 of the speech forms of Ghana. Clusters are defined by the level of mutual intelligibility.
Cluster 1 may better be named r-Akan, which do not explicitly have the letter “l” in their original proper use. On the other hand l-Akan, refers to the Akan cluster comprising Nzema, Baule, and other dialects spoken mainly in the Ivory Coast, whose use of the letter “r” in proper usage is very rare.
Because the Akan dialects' phonologies differ slightly, Asante dialect will be used to represent Akan. Asante, like all Akan dialects, involves extensive palatalisation, vowel harmony, and tone terracing.
Before front vowels, all Asante consonants are palatalized (or labio-palatalized), and the plosives are to some extent affricated. The allophones of /n/ are quite complex. In the table below, palatalized allophones which involve more than minor phonetic palatalization are specified, in the context of the vowel /i/. These sounds do occur before other vowels, such as /a/, though in most cases not commonly.
In Asante, /ɡu/ followed by a vowel is pronounced /ɡʷ/, but in Akuapem it remains /ɡu/. The sequence /nh/ is pronounced [ŋŋ̊].
The transcriptions in the table below are in the order /phonemic/, [phonetic], ‹orthographic›. Note that orthographic ‹dw› is ambiguous; in textbooks, ‹dw› = /ɡ/ may be distinguished from /dw/ with a diacritic: d̩w. Likewise, velar ‹nw› (ŋw) may be transcribed n̩w. Orthographic ‹nu› is palatalized [ɲᶣĩ].
| labial | alveolar | dorsal | labialized | |||||||||
| voiceless plosive | /p/ | [pʰ] | ‹p› | /t/ | [tʰ, tçi] | ‹t, ti› | /k/ | [kʰ, tɕʰi~cçʰi] | ‹k, kyi› | /kʷ/ | [kʷ, tɕᶣi] | ‹kw, twi› |
| voiced plosive | /b/ | [b] | ‹b› | /d/ | [d] | ‹d› | /ɡ/ | [ɡ, dʒ, dʑi~ɟʝi] | ‹g, dw, gyi› | /ɡʷ/ | [ɡʷ, dʑᶣi] | ‹gw, dwi› |
| fricative | /f/ | [f] | ‹f› | /s/ | [s] | ‹s› | /h/ | [h, çi] | ‹h, hyi› | /hʷ/ | [hʷ, çᶣi] | ‹hw, hwi› |
| nasal stop | /m/ | [m] | ‹m› | /n/ | [n, ŋ, ɲ, ɲĩ] | ‹n, ngi› | /nʷ/ | [ŋŋʷ, ɲᶣĩ] | ‹nw, nu› | |||
| geminate nasal | /nn/ | [ŋː, ɲːĩ] | ‹ng, nyi, nnyi› | /nnʷ/ | [ɲɲᶣĩ] | ‹nw› | ||||||
| other | /r/ | [ɾ, r, ɽ] | ‹r› | /w/ | [w, ɥi] | ‹w, wi› | ||||||
The Akan dialects have fourteen to fifteen vowels: four to five "tense" vowels (Advanced tongue root, or +ATR), five "lax" vowels (Retracted tongue root, or −ATR), which are adequately but not completely represented by the seven-vowel orthography, and five nasal vowels, which are not represented at all. (All fourteen were distinguished in the Gold Coast script of the colonial era.) An ATR distinction in orthographic a is only found in some subdialects of Fante, though not in the literary form; in Asante and Akuapem there are harmonic allophones of /a/, but neither is ATR. The two vowels written e (/e̘/ and /i/) and o (/o̘/ and /u/) are often not distinguished in pronunciation.
| Orthog. | +ATR | −ATR |
|---|---|---|
| i | /i̘/ [i̘] | |
| e | /e̘/ [e̘] | /i/ [ɪ~e] |
| ɛ | /e/ [ɛ] | |
| a | [æ~ɐ] | /a/ [a] |
| ɔ | /o/ [ɔ] | |
| o | /o̘/ [o̘] | /u/ [ʊ~o] |
| u | /u̘/ [u̘] |
Twi vowels engage in a form of vowel harmony with the root of the tongue.
Twi has three phonemic tones, high (/H/), mid (/M/), and low (/L/). Initial syllable may only be high or low.
The phonetic pitch of the three tones depends on their environment, often being lowered after other tones, producing a steady decline known as tone terracing.
/H/ tones have the same pitch as a preceding /H/ or /M/ tone within the same tonic phrase, whereas /M/ tones have a lower pitch. That is, the sequences /HH/ and /MH/ have a level pitch, whereas the sequences /HM/ and /MM/ have a falling pitch. /H/ is lowered (downstepped) after a /L/.
/L/ is the default tone, which emerges in situations such as reduplicated prefixes. It is always at bottom of the speaker's pitch range,, except in the sequence /HLH/, in which case it is raised in pitch but the final /H/ is still lowered. Thus /HMH/ and /HLH/ are pronounced with distinct but very similar pitches.
After the first "prominent" syllable of a clause, usually the first high tone, there is a downstep. This syllable is usually stressed.
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