Twi () is a dialect of the

Akan language Akan () is a Central Tano language and the principal native language of the Akan people of Ghana, spoken over much of the southern half of Ghana. About 80% of Ghana's population can speak Akan, and about 44% of Ghanaians are native speakers. ...

spoken in southern and central

Ghana Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and Tog ...

by several million people, mainly of the

Akan people The Akan () people live primarily in present-day Ghana and Ivory Coast in West Africa. The Akan language (also known as ''Twi/Fante'') are a group of dialects within the Central Tano branch of the Potou–Tano subfamily of the Niger–Con ...

, the largest of the seventeen major ethnic groups in Ghana. Twi has about 17-18 million speakers in total, including second-language speakers; about 80% of the Ghanaian population speaks Twi as a first or

second language A person's second language, or L2, is a language that is not the native language ( first language or L1) of the speaker, but is learned later. A second language may be a neighbouring language, another language of the speaker's home country, or a ...

.Jane Garry, Carl R. Galvez Rubino, "Facts about the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages, Past and Present", H.W. Wilson, USA, 2001, page 8 Like other West African languages, Twi is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

. Twi is a common name for

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as a ...

former literary dialects of the Akan language,

Bono Paul David Hewson (born 10 May 1960), known by his stage name Bono (), is an Irish singer-songwriter, activist, and philanthropist. He is the lead vocalist and primary lyricist of the rock band U2. Born and raised in Dublin, he attended ...

, Asante, and Akuapem. Akuapem, as the first Akan dialect to be used for Bible translation, has become the prestige dialect as a result. It is also spoken by the people of southeastern

Côte d'Ivoire Ivory Coast, also known as Côte d'Ivoire, officially the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, is a country on the southern coast of West Africa. Its capital is Yamoussoukro, in the centre of the country, while its largest city and economic centre ...

Etymology

The name "Twi" is derived from the name of a

king, Nana Baffuor Twi.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Tone

Twi has at least 5 tones: high, mid, low, rising, falling.

Diphthongs

Twi contains the diphthongs /ao/, /eɛ/, /ei/, /ia/, /ie/, /oɔ/, /ue/, and /uo/.

Orthography

The letters C, J, Q, V, X and Z are also used, but only in

loanwords A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...

Naming system

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.

References

External links

*
Language resources
at LangMedia (Five College Center for World Languages)

Bibliography of structural properties of the Twi language
at WALS Online (The World Atlas of Language Structures)
Akuapem Twi to English Parallel Text Dataset
{{Authority control Ashanti people Akan Akan language