Akan

Akan is one language with several names, and which name a speaker uses depends on where they are standing. Asante Twi is the variety of the Asante heartland around Kumasi. Akuapem Twi is spoken on the ridge north of Accra. Fante is spoken along the coast. The three are mutually intelligible, and a speaker of one follows the others without difficulty, but each has been given its own written standard, so that Akan has three orthographies and three bodies of printed literature rather than one.

That happened because writing came with missions, and different missions worked in different places. Akuapem Twi was standardised first, by Basel mission scholarship in the nineteenth century, and it became the language of the Akan Bible; the Methodists worked on the coast in Fante; Asante Twi was standardised later and is now the variety with the most speakers.

The language is Kwa, in the Niger-Congo family, and it is tonal. Vowel harmony governs which vowels may appear together in a word, and the written standards mark it with additional letters that English keyboards do not carry, which is one practical reason Akan is often written online without them.

Akan is the first language of a large plurality of Ghanaians and is used as a second language by many more, so that it functions as a national lingua franca in a country whose official language is English. It has no historic script of its own; the writing systems in use are Latin.

Three Akan institutions are made of language, and none of them can be explained without it.

The first is the day name. Every Akan child receives a name fixed by the day of the week on which it was born, in a matched pair of male and female forms, and the name is not decorative: it belongs to an account of the person in which the kra, the soul portion that comes from Nyame, arrives on that day. Kwame, Kofi, Yaa and Akosua are ordinary Akan words before they are anybody's name, and they travelled with the Atlantic trade, which is why Akan day names surface in the Caribbean and the Americas attached to people whose descendants no longer speak the language.

The second is drum language. The Asante talking drums do not send a code. They reproduce the tone and rhythm of Akan speech itself, so that a drummed text is the language spoken by another instrument, and a listener who knows the conventional phrases hears sentences. The court drums carry praise texts, genealogies and the announcements of state, and the practice depends entirely on Akan being tonal.

The third is adinkra. Each stamped symbol stands for a proverb or a saying, and the symbol is an abbreviation of the sentence rather than a picture of a thing. Gye Nyame, the best known of them, is an Akan clause. Read the symbols without the language and you have a design; read them with it and you have a body of aphorism about power, mortality, patience and God.