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36-602: Twi ( [tɕᶣi] ) is the common name of the Akan literary dialects of Asante and Akuapem . Effectively, it is a synonym for 'Akan' that is not used by the Fante people . It is not a linguistic grouping, as Akuapem Twi is more closely related to Fante dialect than it is to Asante Twi. Twi generally subsumes the following Akan dialects: Ahafo, Akuapem, Akyem , Asante, Asen, Dankyira and Kwawu , which have about 4.4 million speakers in southern and central Ghana . The name "Twi"

72-824: 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 the Jamaican Maroons , also known as the Coromantee . The cultures of

108-576: 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

144-661: A consonant sometimes causes surrounding vowels to change by coarticulation or assimilation . In Russian, "soft" (palatalized) consonants are usually followed by vowels that are relatively more front (that is, closer to [i] or [y] ), and vowels following "hard" (unpalatalized) consonants are further back . See Russian phonology § Allophony for more information. In many Slavic languages , palatal or palatalized consonants are called soft , and others are called hard . Some of them, like Russian , have numerous pairs of palatalized and unpalatalized consonant phonemes. Russian Cyrillic has pairs of vowel letters that mark whether

180-411: 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

216-642: A regular African language of study in the annual Summer Cooperative African Languages Institute (SCALI) program. 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. Palatalization (phonetics) In phonetics , palatalization ( / ˌ p æ l ə t ə l aɪ ˈ z eɪ ʃ ən / , US also /- l ɪ -/ ) or palatization

252-468: 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

288-722: Is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate . Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by affixing the letter ⟨ʲ⟩ to the base consonant. Palatalization is not phonemic in English, but it is in Slavic languages such as Russian and Ukrainian , Finnic languages such as Estonian and Võro , Irish , Marshallese , Kashmiri , and Japanese . In technical terms, palatalization refers to

324-495: Is derived from the name of a Bono king, Nana Baffuor Twi . Akan language 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 the other standards until the Akan Orthography Committee (AOC)'s development of

360-478: 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

396-428: Is used as a morpheme or part of a morpheme. In some cases, a vowel caused a consonant to become palatalized, and then this vowel was lost by elision . Here, there appears to be a phonemic contrast when analysis of the deep structure shows it to be allophonic. In Romanian , consonants are palatalized before /i/ . Palatalized consonants appear at the end of the word, and mark the plural in nouns and adjectives, and

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432-797: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), palatalized consonants are marked by the modifier letter ⟨ʲ⟩ , a superscript version of the symbol for the palatal approximant ⟨ j ⟩. For instance, ⟨ tʲ ⟩ represents the palatalized form of the voiceless alveolar stop [t] . Prior to 1989 , a subscript diacritic was used in the IPA: ⟨ ᶀ ᶈ ᶆ ᶂ ᶌ ƫ ᶁ ᶇ ᶊ ᶎ ᶅ 𝼓 ᶉ 𝼖 𝼕 ᶄ ᶃ 𝼔 ᶍ ꞕ ⟩, apart from two palatalized fricatives which were written instead with curly-tailed variants, namely ⟨ ʆ ⟩ for [ʃʲ] and ⟨ ʓ ⟩ for [ʒʲ] . (See palatal hook .) The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet marks palatalized consonants by an acute accent , as do some Finnic languages using

468-583: The secondary articulation of consonants by which the body of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate and the alveolar ridge during the articulation of the consonant. Such consonants are phonetically palatalized. "Pure" palatalization is a modification to the articulation of a consonant, where the middle of the tongue is raised, and nothing else. It may produce a laminal articulation of otherwise apical consonants such as /t/ and /s/ . Phonetically palatalized consonants may vary in their exact realization. Some languages add semivowels before or after

504-732: 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

540-532: 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

576-809: 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

612-634: The Latin alphabet, as in Võro ⟨ ś ⟩ . Others use an apostrophe, as in Karelian ⟨s'⟩ ; or digraphs in j , as in the Savonian dialects of Finnish , ⟨sj⟩ . Palatalization has varying phonological significance in different languages. It is allophonic in English, but phonemic in others. In English, consonants are palatalized when they occur before front vowels or

648-593: The consonant preceding them is hard/soft: ⟨ а ⟩ / ⟨ я ⟩ , ⟨ э ⟩ / ⟨ е ⟩ , ⟨ ы ⟩ / ⟨ и ⟩ , ⟨ о ⟩ / ⟨ ё ⟩ , and ⟨ у ⟩ / ⟨ ю ⟩ . The otherwise silent soft sign ⟨ ь ⟩ also indicates that the previous consonant is soft. Irish and Scottish Gaelic have pairs of palatalized ( slender ) and unpalatalized ( broad ) consonant phonemes. In Irish, most broad consonants are velarized . In Scottish Gaelic,

684-516: 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

720-665: 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, the Akans who live in Ghana migrated in successive waves between

756-829: The front vowel /i/ and not palatalized in other cases. In some languages, palatalization is a distinctive feature that distinguishes two consonant phonemes . This feature occurs in Russian , Irish , and Scottish Gaelic , among others. Phonemic palatalization may be contrasted with either plain or velarized articulation. In many of the Slavic languages , and some of the Baltic and Finnic languages , palatalized consonants contrast with plain consonants, but in Irish they contrast with velarized consonants. Some palatalized phonemes undergo change beyond phonetic palatalization. For instance,

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792-449: 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

828-445: The only velarized consonants are [n̪ˠ] and [l̪ˠ] ; [r] is sometimes described as velarized as well. Yōon are Japanese moras formed with an added [ j ] sound between the initial consonant and the vowel. For example, 今日 ( kyō , "today") is written きょう [ kʲoo ], using a small version of よ , while 器用 ( kiyō , "skillful") is written きよう [ kijoo ], with a full-sized よ. Historically , yōon were not distinguished with

864-491: The other). In some languages, like English, palatalization is allophonic . Some phonemes have palatalized allophones in certain contexts, typically before front vowels and unpalatalized allophones elsewhere. Because it is allophonic, palatalization of this type does not distinguish words and often goes unnoticed by native speakers. Phonetic palatalization occurs in American English. Stops are palatalized before

900-414: The palatal approximant (and in a few other cases), but no words are distinguished by palatalization ( complementary distribution ), whereas in some of the other languages, the difference between palatalized consonants and plain un-palatalized consonants distinguish es between words, appearing in a contrastive distribution (where one of the two versions, palatalized or not, appears in the same environment as

936-556: The palatalization is heard as both an onglide and an offglide. In some cases, the realization of palatalization may change without any corresponding phonemic change. For example, according to Thurneysen, palatalized consonants at the end of a syllable in Old Irish had a corresponding onglide (reflected as ⟨i⟩ in the spelling), which was no longer present in Middle Irish (based on explicit testimony of grammarians of

972-411: The palatalized consonant (onglides or offglides). In such cases, the vowel (especially a non-front vowel) following a palatalized consonant typically has a palatal onglide. In Russian , both plain and palatalized consonant phonemes are found in words like большой [bɐlʲˈʂoj] , царь [tsarʲ] and Катя [ˈkatʲə] . In Hupa , on the other hand,

1008-412: 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

1044-405: 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

1080-859: The second person singular in verbs. On the surface, it would appear then that ban [ban] "coin" forms a minimal pair with bani [banʲ] . The interpretation commonly taken, however, is that an underlying morpheme |-i| palatalizes the consonant and is subsequently deleted. Palatalization may also occur as a morphological feature. For example, although Russian makes phonemic contrasts between palatalized and unpalatalized consonants, alternations across morpheme boundaries are normal: In some languages, allophonic palatalization developed into phonemic palatalization by phonemic split . In other languages, phonemes that were originally phonetically palatalized changed further: palatal secondary place of articulation developed into changes in manner of articulation or primary place of articulation. Phonetic palatalization of

1116-571: 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

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1152-586: The smaller kana and had to be determined by context. In the Marshallese language , each consonant has some type of secondary articulation (palatalization, velarization, or labiovelarization ). The palatalized consonants are regarded as "light", and the velarized and rounded consonants are regarded as "heavy", with the rounded consonants being both velarized and labialized. Many Norwegian dialects have phonemic palatalized consonants. In many parts of Northern Norway and many areas of Møre og Romsdal, for example,

1188-525: 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

1224-583: 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

1260-586: The time). In a few languages, including Skolt Sami and many of the Central Chadic languages , palatalization is a suprasegmental feature that affects the pronunciation of an entire syllable, and it may cause certain vowels to be pronounced more front and consonants to be slightly palatalized. In Skolt Sami and its relatives ( Kildin Sami and Ter Sami ), suprasegmental palatalization contrasts with segmental palatal articulation (palatal consonants). In

1296-449: The unpalatalized sibilant (Irish /sˠ/ , Scottish /s̪/ ) has a palatalized counterpart that is actually postalveolar [ʃ] , not phonetically palatalized [sʲ] , and the velar fricative /x/ in both languages has a palatalized counterpart that is actually palatal [ç] rather than palatalized velar [xʲ] . These shifts in primary place of articulation are examples of the sound change of palatalization . In some languages, palatalization

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