| Akan | |
| Nativename: | Akan: Ákán |
| States: | Ghana |
| Ethnicity: | million Akan (2021 census) |
| Speakers: | L1 million |
| Date: | 2013 |
| Ref: | e27 |
| Speakers2: | L2 million (no date) |
| Familycolor: | Niger-Congo |
| Fam2: | Atlantic–Congo |
| Fam3: | Volta–Congo |
| Fam4: | Kwa |
| Fam5: | Potou–Tano |
| Fam6: | Tano |
| Fam7: | Central Tano |
| Dia1: | Asante |
| Dia2: | Akuapem |
| Dia3: | Fante |
| Dia4: | Bono |
| Dia5: | Wasa |
| Nation: | None. — Government-sponsored language of Ghana |
| Agency: | Akan Orthography Committee |
| Script: | Latin |
| Iso1: | ak |
| Iso2: | aka |
| Iso3: | aka |
| Glotto: | akan1251 |
| Glottoname: | Akanic |
| Notice: | IPA |
Akan is the largest language of Ghana, and the principal native language of the Akan people, spoken over much of the southern half of Ghana. About 80% of Ghana's population speak Akan as a first or second language, and about 44% of Ghanaians are native speakers.[1] Akan is also spoken across the border in parts of Côte d'Ivoire.[2]
Three dialects were developed as literary standards with distinct orthographies: Asante and Akuapem, collectively known as Twi, and Fante.[3] Despite being mutually intelligible,[4] they were inaccessible in written form to speakers of the other standards until the Akan Orthography Committee (AOC)'s development of a common Akan orthography in 1978, based mainly on Akuapem dialect.[5] As the first Akan variety to be used for Bible translation, Akuapem had become the prestige dialect.[6]
With the Atlantic slave trade, Akan languages were introduced to the Caribbean and South America, notably in Suriname, spoken by the Ndyuka, and in Jamaica, spoken by the Jamaican Maroons, also known as the Coromantee. The cultures of the descendants of escaped slaves in the interior of Suriname and the Maroons in Jamaica still retain Akan influences, including the Akan naming practice of naming children after the day of the week on which they are born, e.g. Akwasi/Kwasi for a boy or Akosua for a girl born on a Sunday. In Jamaica and Suriname, the Anansi spider stories are still well-known.[7]
In history, the Akans who live in Ghana migrated in successive waves between the 11th and 18th centuries. Others inhabit the eastern part of Côte d'Ivoire and parts of Togo.[8] They migrated from the north to occupy the forest and coastal areas in the south in the 13th century. The Akans have a strong oral history tradition of their past and they're also known in the art history world for symbolic artifacts of wood, metal and terracotta. Their cultural ideas are expressed in stories and proverbs and also in designs such as symbols used in carvings and on clothes. The cultural and historic nature of the Akans in Ghana makes it an area of research for various disciplines such as folklore, literary studies, linguistics, anthropology and history.
Akan is a dialect continuum that is closely related to the Bia languages, the other Central Tano languages spoken by the Akan people. The relationships of the major Akan dialects are as follows:[9]
Ethnologue reports that Brong and Wasa have limited mutual intelligibility with each other, and so may be considered separate languages, though Dolphyne reports that they are mutually intelligible with at least neighboring dialects of the rest of Akan.
The Akan dialects contain extensive palatalization, vowel harmony, and tone terracing.
Before front vowels, all Asante consonants are palatalized (or labio-palatalized), and the stops are to some extent affricated. The allophones of pronounced as //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 pronounced as //i//. These sounds do occur before other vowels, such as pronounced as //a//, though in most cases not commonly.
In Asante, pronounced as //ɡu// followed by a vowel is pronounced pronounced as //ɡʷ//, but in Akuapem it remains pronounced as //ɡu//. The sequence pronounced as //nh// is pronounced pronounced as /[ŋŋ̊]/.
A word final pronounced as //k// can be heard as a glottal stop pronounced as /[ʔ]/. There is also a nasalization of pronounced as //h// and of pronounced as //j w// as pronounced as /[h̃]/ and pronounced as /[j̃ w̃]/, when occurring before nasal vowels.
The transcriptions in the tables below are in the order /phonemic/, [phonetic]. Note that orthographic is ambiguous; in textbooks, = pronounced as //ɡ// may be distinguished from pronounced as //dw// with a diacritic: pronounced as /d̩w/. Likewise, velar (pronounced as /ŋw/) may be transcribed pronounced as /n̩w/. Orthographic is palatalized pronounced as /[ɲᶣ]/.
| Labial | Alveolar | Dorsal | Labialized | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | plain | /pronounced as /ink// | pronounced as /link/ | /nʷ/ | ||
| geminated | /nː/ | /nːʷ/ | ||||
| Stop | voiceless | /pronounced as /link// | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | /kʷ/ | |
| voiced | /pronounced as /ink// | /pronounced as /link// | pronounced as /link/ | /ɡʷ/ | ||
| Fricative | /pronounced as /ink// | /pronounced as /ink// | pronounced as /link/ | /hʷ/ | ||
| Trill | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | /pronounced as /link// | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Labial | Alveolar | Dorsal | Labialized | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phoneme | Allophones | Phoneme | Allophones | Phoneme | Allophones | ||||
| Nasal | plain | /pronounced as /ink// | pronounced as /link/ | [{{IPA link|n}}~{{IPAlink|ŋ}}, {{IPAlink|ɲ}}, ɲĩ] | /nʷ/ | [ŋʷ, ɲᶣ] | |||
| geminated | /nː/ | [ŋː, ɲːĩ] | /nːʷ/ | [ɲːᶣ] | |||||
| Stop | voiceless | /pronounced as /link// | pronounced as /link/ | [{{IPAlink|t}}, t<sup>ç</sup>i] | pronounced as /link/ | [{{IPAlink|k}}, tɕ~cç] | /kʷ/ | [kʷ, tɕᶣi] | |
| voiced | /pronounced as /ink// | /pronounced as /link// | pronounced as /link/ | [{{IPA link|g}}, {{IPAlink|dʒ}}, dʑ~ɟʝ] | /ɡʷ/ | [ɡʷ, dʑᶣi] | |||
| Fricative | /pronounced as /ink// | /pronounced as /ink// | pronounced as /link/ | [h, ç] | /hʷ/ | [hʷ, çᶣi] | |||
| Trill | pronounced as /link/ | [{{IPAlink|ɾ}}, {{IPAlink|r}}, {{IPAlink|ɽ}}] | |||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | /pronounced as /link// | pronounced as /link/ | [w, ɥ] | |||||
The Akan dialects have fourteen to fifteen vowels: four to five "tense" vowels (advanced tongue root; +ATR or -RTR), five "lax" vowels (retracted tongue root, +RTR or -ATR), which are not entirely contrastively represented by the seven-vowel orthography, and five nasal vowels, which are not represented at all. All fourteen were distinguished in the Gold Coast alphabet of the colonial era. A tongue-root distinction in orthographic a is only found in some subdialects of Fante, but not in the literary form; in Asante and Akuapem there are harmonic allophones of pronounced as //a//, but neither is ATR. The two vowels written e (pronounced as //e// and pronounced as //i̙//) and o (pronounced as //o// and pronounced as //u̙//) are often not distinguished in pronunciation.
| Front | Central | Back | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| -RTR | +RTR | -RTR | +RTR | -RTR | +RTR | ||
| Close | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Open | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| Orthog. | -RTR | +RTR | |
|---|---|---|---|
| i | pronounced as //i// pronounced as /[i]/ | ||
| e | pronounced as //e// pronounced as /[e]/ | pronounced as //i̙// pronounced as /[ɪ~e]/ | |
| ɛ | pronounced as //e̙// pronounced as /[ɛ]/ | ||
| a | pronounced as //a// pronounced as /[æ~ɐ~ə]/ | pronounced as //a̙// pronounced as /[a]/ | |
| ɔ | pronounced as //o̙// pronounced as /[ɔ]/ | ||
| o | pronounced as //o// pronounced as /[o]/ | pronounced as //u̙// pronounced as /[ʊ~o]/ | |
| u | pronounced as //u// pronounced as /[u]/ |
Akan vowels engage in a form of vowel harmony with the root of the tongue.[10]
Akan 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.[11]
Akan forms some plural nouns by adding the prefixes 'm' or 'n' to the original word and removing the first sound of the noun. Example include nouns like abofra (child), which forms its plural by removing the 'ab' from the word and adding 'mm' to form its plural: mmofra (children). Same goes for aboa (animal) to mmoa (animals), abusua (family) to mmusua (families), abirekyie (goat) to mmirekyie (goats) etc. in the Asante dialect.
The nouns which use the 'n' prefix include; adaka (box) to nnaka (boxes), adanko (rabbit) to nnanko (rabbits), aduro (medicine) to nnuro (medicines), atare (dress) to ntare (dresses), odwan (sheep) to nnwan (sheep plural), aduane (food) to nnuane (food plural), kraman (dog) to nkraman (dogs), kanea (light) to nkanea (lights), safoa (key) to nsafoa (keys).
Akan can create plural nouns by adding the suffix nom to the original word. Examples include; agya (father) to agyanom (fathers), nana (grandparent/grandchild) to nananom (grandparents/grandchildren), nua (sibling) to nuanom (siblings), yere (wife) to yerenom (wives).
Some Akan nouns are the same in both singular and plural. Nouns such as nkyene (salt), ani (eye), sika (money), etc., are written the same in both singular and plural.[12]
| Uppercase | A | B | D | E | Ɛ | F | G | H | I | K | L | M | N | O | Ɔ | P | R | S | T | U | W | Y | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lowercase | a | b | d | e | ɛ | f | g | h | i | k | l | m | n | o | ɔ | p | r | s | t | u | w | y |
The Akan languages have a rich literature in proverbs, folktales, and traditional drama, as well as a new literature in dramas, short stories, and novels.[13] This literature began to be documented in written form in the late 1800s.[14] Later, Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia collected a number of proverbs and folktales, including Funeral Dirges of the Akan People (1969), Folk Songs of Ghana (1963), and Akan Poetry (1958). Some of the important authors in the language are A. A. Opoku (dramatist), E. J. Osew (dramatist), K. E. Owusu (novelist), and R. A. Tabi (dramatist and novelist). The Bureau of Ghana Languages has been unable to continue printing novels in the language, and the following are out of print: Obreguo, Okrabiri, Afrakoma, Obeede, Fia Tsatsala, and Ku Di Fo Nanawu.[15]
In 1978 the AOC established a common orthography for all of Akan, which is used as the medium of instruction in primary school.[16] [17] The Akan language is recognized for literacy, from at least the lower primary level (primary 1–3).
Akan languages are studied at several major universities in the United States, including Ohio University, Ohio State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Harvard University, Boston University, Indiana University, University of Michigan, and The University of Florida. Akan has been a regular African language of study in the annual Summer Cooperative African Languages Institute (SCALI) program.[18] The Akan language is studied in these universities as a bachelor or masters program.
The Akan peoples use a common Akan (Ghana) naming system of giving the first name to a child, based on the day of the week that the child was born. Almost all the tribes and clans in Ghana have a similar custom.
| Day | Male name | Female name | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | Akan | |||
| Monday | Twi: Dwoada | Twi: Kwadwo, Kojo | Twi: Adwoa | |
| Tuesday | Twi: Benada | Twi: Kwabena, Kobina | Twi: Abena | |
| Wednesday | Twi: Wukuada | Twi: Kweku, Kwaku | Twi: Akua | |
| Thursday | Twi: Yawoada | Twi: Yaw, Kwaw | Twi: Yaa | |
| Friday | Twi: Fiada | Twi: Kofi | Twi: Afia/Afua | |
| Saturday | Twi: Memeneda | Twi: Kwame | Twi: Ama | |
| Sunday | Twi: Kwasiada | Twi: Akwasi, Kwasi, Kwesi | Twi: Asi, Akosua, Esi |