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43-582: The district is the most ethnically diverse in Sierra Leone, as it is home to a significant population of all of Sierra Leone's ethnic groups. Like in virtually all parts of Sierra Leone, the Krio language is by far the most widely spoken language in Freetown and is spoken by the entire residents of Western Area Urban District. The district is locally governed by a directly elected city council , known as

86-576: A common orthography for all of Akan, which is used as the medium of instruction in primary school . 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

129-411: A form of vowel harmony with the root of the tongue. 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

172-458: A question can be asked simply by intonation. E.g. Yu de go? : 'Are you going' vs yu de go : 'you are going.' Additionally the question particles 'ènti' and 'nòoso' can be used at the start or end of the phrase respectively. There is no distinction between masculine and feminine in any person and, unlike Standard English, there is a second person plural form. However, there are the hints of nominative , accusative and genitive cases. Krio uses

215-468: A rich literature in proverbs, folktales, and traditional drama, as well as a new literature in dramas, short stories, and novels. This literature began to be documented in written form in the late 1800s. 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

258-588: A stable language, the native language of descendants of the freed slaves (which are now a distinct ethnic and cultural group, the Creoles), and the lingua franca of Sierra Leone. Most ethnic and cultural Creoles live in and around Freetown , the capital of Sierra Leone, and their community accounts for about 3% to 6% of Sierra Leone's total population (Freetown is the province where the returned slaves from London and Nova Scotia settled). However, because of their cultural influence in Sierra Leone, especially during

301-819: Is Boris Gerrets' film Shado’man (2014). It was shot in Freetown at night with a group of homeless disabled people. The film premiered at the IDFA documentary festival in Amsterdam and was seen in festivals around the world including FESPACO, the biannual Pan-African film festival in Ouagadougou. Peter Grant, the protagonist of Ben Aaronovitch 's Rivers of London series, is the London-born son of an immigrant from Sierra Leone. While speaking English with other characters, he speaks Krio with his mother. Aaronovitch includes some such conversations in his text, leaving

344-456: Is a common process in phonology. It is typically applied to lexical items in English containing two or more consonants in a row including an initial s . Some examples include: Replacing a stop for a fricative, known as stopping substitution , is also common in words of English origin. Some examples include: There is also evidence of the influence of West African languages in the presence of

387-637: Is critical when evaluating and monitoring progress in communication and language acquisition. Below are some sample words in Krio: Below are some sample sentences in Krio: Below is a sample of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Krio: Krio is used (incorrectly) early in the 2006 film Blood Diamond between Danny Archer (played by Leonardo DiCaprio ) and a character named Commander Zero. It can also be heard in

430-478: 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. 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

473-653: Is the wealthiest in Sierra Leone, having the largest economy, financial and cultural center, as well as the seat of the country's central government. During the course of the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa , the Western Area Urban District was selected to trial a vaccine for the disease as it had been heavily affected by the outbreak. After the 2017 local administrative reorganization, Western Area Urban District has made up of seven chiefdoms as

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516-599: The Freetown City Council , headed by a mayor . Members of the Freetown city council and the mayor of Freetown, are directly elected every four years in a municipal election . The Freetown City Council is the largest of the six municipal governments in Sierra Leone. In 2007, the Western Area Urban District gained nine seats in the Parliament of Sierra Leone when district representation started to be measured by population. The Western Area Urban District

559-580: The French-based creoles of the Caribbean. Krio contains seven monophthongs in its inventory of vowels , all of which can be nasalized. Most nasal vowels occur in words derived from English, in cases where an oral vowel precedes a nasal consonant . The nasal consonant is deleted and the vowel is nasalized. Krio has three diphthongs : /ai/, /au/, and /ɔi/. There are 24 phonemes in the consonant inventory of Krio. Consonant cluster reduction

602-845: 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. In history,

645-642: The Latin script but without Qq and Xx and with three additional letters from the African reference alphabet , Ɛɛ (open E), Ŋŋ (eng), and Ɔɔ (open O). Three tones can be distinguished in Krio and are sometimes marked with grave (à), acute (á), and circumflex (â) accents over the vowels for low, high, and falling tones respectively but these accents are not employed in normal usage. The complete alphabet with digraphs : Spontaneous language sample analysis

688-624: The West Indies , Canada , United States and the British Empire , and is spoken as a second language by millions of other Sierra Leoneans belonging to the country's indigenous tribes . Krio, along with English, is the official language of Sierra Leone. The Krio language is an offshoot of the languages and variations of English brought by the Nova Scotian Settlers from North America , Maroons from Jamaica , and

731-510: The labial-velar plosives /kp/ and /gb/, as in: Krio is a tonal language and makes contrastive use of tone in both African and English words. Examples of minimal pairs of words distinguished by tone patterns are: The suffix "-dèm" is used to mark the plural, as well as the genitive plural e.g. "uman" ("woman"). Verbs do not conjugate according to person or number, but reflect their tense. Tense, aspect and mood are marked by one or more tense or aspect markers. The tense markers are 'bin' for

774-732: 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

817-809: 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: Brong (Bono) Wasa Asante Akuapem Fante 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

860-599: 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 . 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

903-590: The Gambia, the Gambian Creoles or Aku community speak Krio. The Fernando Po Creole English language of Equatorial Guinea is also largely a result of Sierra Leone Creole migrants. A small number of liberated Africans returned to the land of their origins, such as the Saros of Nigeria who not only took their Western names with them but also imported Krio words like sabi into Nigerian Pidgin English . During

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946-666: The Krio word gentri / gentree , which means wealth or to acquire wealth, is derived from the Old French word ' gentry ', and the Krio word pikin , which means 'child', indirectly comes from the Portuguese word pequeno meaning 'small' and often used to mean children in Portuguese. In Sierra Leone , the Krio Language is spoken by people with different degrees of fluency, as well as regional changes to

989-610: The Krio. Many of the speakers of Sierra Leone Krio live in or close to the capital city, Freetown . As of 2007, there were close to 350,000 individuals who spoke Krio as a primary language. Even more individuals were using it as a main language for communication purposes in the country as a whole. One theory suggests the early roots of Krio go back to the Atlantic slave trade era in the 17th and 18th centuries when an English-based " pidgin " language ( West African Pidgin English , also called Guinea Coast Creole English) arose to facilitate

1032-728: The Maroons, as there are well-documented and important direct historical connections between Jamaica and Sierra Leone. The language was also influenced by African American Vernacular English while the majority of the African words in Krio come from the Akan , Yoruba and Igbo . As an English-based creole language, the Sierra Leone Krio is distinct from a pidgin as it is a language in its own right, with fixed grammatical structures and rules. Krio also draws from other European languages , like Portuguese and French , e.g.

1075-429: The coastal trade between Europeans and Africans. This early pidgin later became the lingua franca of regional trade among West Africans themselves and likely spread up the river systems to the African interior. After the founding of Freetown, this preexisting pidgin was incorporated into the speech of the various groups of freed slaves landed in Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1855. The pidgin gradually evolved to become

1118-516: 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] . A word final /k/ can be heard as a glottal stop [ʔ] . There is also a nasalization of /h/ and of /j w/ as [h̃] and [j̃ w̃] , when occurring before nasal vowels. The transcriptions in

1161-503: The country's population, and it unites the different ethnic groups in the country, especially in their trade and social interaction with each other. Krio is the primary language of communication among Sierra Leoneans at home and abroad, and has also heavily influenced Sierra Leonean English . The language is native to the Sierra Leone Creole people , or Krios, a community of about 104,311 descendants of freed slaves from

1204-449: 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 . In 1978 the AOC established

1247-574: The involvement of Lutheran Bible Translators, Krio-language translations of the New Testament and Old Testament were published in 1986 and 2013. While English is Sierra Leone's official language, the Ministry of Education began using Krio as the medium of instruction in some primary schools in Freetown in the 1990s. Radio stations now broadcast a wide variety of programs in Krio. Sierra Leonean politicians also routinely give public speeches in

1290-523: The language. Krio is an English-based creole from which descend Nigerian Pidgin English and Cameroonian Pidgin English and Pichinglis . It is also similar to English-based creole languages spoken in the Americas, especially Jamaican Patois (Jamaican Creole), Sranan Tongo (Surinamese Creole), Bajan Creole and Gullah language , but it has its own distinctive character. It also shares some linguistic similarities with non-English creoles, such as

1333-633: The music video for " Diamonds from Sierra Leone ", a song by American rapper Kanye West. In 2007, work was completed on an unsanctioned, dubbed Krio version of Franco Zeffirelli 's 1977 film Jesus of Nazareth . The dubs were recorded by a team of over 14 native Krio speakers, over a period of 9 months in the Lungi region of Sierra Leone. The film aired on ABC-TV and a limited run of 300 copies were produced, which were mostly sold in Lungi and Freetown. The first feature-length documentary entirely spoken in Krio

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1376-474: The numerous liberated African slaves who settled in Sierra Leone. All freed slaves—the Jamaican Maroons , African-Americans , and Liberated Africans —influenced Krio, but the Jamaican Maroons, Igbo , Yoruba and Akan Liberated Africans were the most influential. It seems probable that the basic grammatical structure and vowel system of Krio is an offshoot of Jamaican Maroon Creole spoken by

1419-733: The other standards until the Akan Orthography Committee (AOC)'s development of a common Akan orthography in 1978, based mainly on Akuapem dialect . As the first Akan variety to be used for Bible translation, Akuapem had become the prestige dialect. 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

1462-532: The past tense and 'go' for the future, the absence of either shows the present tense. Aspect is shown by 'dòn' for perfective and 'de' for imperfective. Infinitive is marked by 'fòr' and conditional by a combination of 'bin' and 'go'. Tendency is marked by 'kin' and 'nòbar'. The verbal paradigm is as follows: The hortative is marked by 'lè' e.g. 'lè wi go, lè wi tòk' and the optative by 'mè' e.g. 'mè yu Kingmara kam, mè yu Will bi duo' The following interrogatives can be used: In addition, like many other creoles,

1505-552: The period of colonial rule, Sierra Leoneans (particularly among the upper class) were discouraged from speaking Krio; but after independence from the United Kingdom in 1961, writers and educators began promoting its use. In the 1960s, Thomas Decker translated some of Shakespeare's plays into Krio, and composed original poetry in the language. In the 1980s, the New Testament was translated into Krio. Beginning with

1548-500: The period of colonial rule, their language is used as the lingua franca among all the ethnic groups in Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Creole people acted as traders and missionaries in other parts of West Africa during the 19th century, and as a result, there are also Krio-speaking communities in The Gambia , Nigeria , Cameroon , Equatorial Guinea , Senegal , and Guinea . As a result of Sierra Leone Creole migratory patterns, in

1591-682: The reader to puzzle out what was said. Akan language Akan ( / ə ˈ k æ n / ) 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 . Akan is also spoken across the border in parts of Côte d'Ivoire . Three dialects were developed as literary standards with distinct orthographies : Asante and Akuapem , collectively known as Twi , and Fante . Despite being mutually intelligible , they were inaccessible in written form to speakers of

1634-412: 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 /n/ are quite complex. In the table below, palatalized allophones which involve more than minor phonetic palatalization are specified, in

1677-405: 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

1720-571: 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 /a/ , but neither is ATR. The two vowels written e ( /e/ and /i̙/ ) and o ( /o/ and /u̙/ ) are often not distinguished in pronunciation. Akan vowels engage in

1763-525: 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. The letters C, J, Q, V, X and Z are also used, but only in loanwords . The Akan languages have

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1806-583: The tables below are in the order / phonemic /, [ phonetic ]. 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 [ɲᶣ] . 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

1849-473: The third level of administrative subdivision. This Sierra Leone location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Krio language The Sierra Leonean Creole or Krio is an English-based creole language that is the lingua franca and de facto national language spoken throughout the West African nation of Sierra Leone . Krio is spoken by 96 percent of

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