Akwaaba!

Akwaaba! Welcome to Ghana! Just for a minute, while you read this column, try to forget that you are in Medford, and join me instead here in West Africa, where I’m spending the semester with Tufts-in-Ghana at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra.

Tufts-in-Ghana is billed as an English-language program, but while courses at the university take place in English, we encounter other languages dozens of times a day. For one thing, Ghana is surrounded on three sides by francophone countries. Ghana is part of ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States, which encourages trade between member nations, so most products in Ghana are labelled in both English and French (and often Portuguese, German, Arabic, or Dutch). I’ve met people from Togo and Burkina Faso and tried out my French 22 on them, with good results.

English and French, however, are also reminders of the colonial legacy of West African nations. Ghana’s colonial past is very much tied up in its modern identity through language, religion, dress, standards of beauty, etc. It is sometimes difficult to discern what is “authentically” Ghanaian, if such a thing exists.

Still, while English is the official language for business, governance and education here, traditional languages dominate the everyday. Ghanaians hail from an estimated 64 ethnic groups and speak 300 different dialects. This is where things can get a little confusing.

The original local language in Accra was Ga. If you have taken a Kiniwe dance class at Tufts you may have learned some Ewe, the language of the Volta region. Regardless of the language spoken at home, most people in Ghana will know Twi, which is the language of the Akan people, the largest ethnic group in Ghana, and is spoken even up in parts of Burkina Faso or over in Togo. (Borders we recognize today were drawn arbitrarily by colonial powers, after which ethnic/language groups and communities were divided.)

It is almost impossible to live in Accra without knowing at least some Twi. English is supposed to be the lingua franca -- the language with which everyone can communicate, regardless of their native tongue -- but in many cases that language is actually Twi. Reaching out in a person’s native language is a significant sign of respect and goodwill. For these reasons, all students on Tufts-in-Ghana take a compulsory course in Twi for the entirety of the semester.

In some regards Twi feels like any other foreign language -- it still uses subject verb order, it still requires vocab memorization and attention to tenses -- but beyond that it is a whole new world. Until relatively recently Twi was an oral language only, so spelling is often phonetic, and minute pronunciation differences can indicate an entirely different verb or tense. We haven’t even really touched tonality yet. It is the beauty of the words themselves that I love most -- the word for poetry, "AnwonosƐm," translates as “to weave words”. "Ɔkra" is cat, whereas "Ɔkraman," “big cat,” is dog.

In this setting, we can put our Twi to practice right away. As I’ll explain next week, using even a little bit of Twi can drastically change a social interaction. People -- in the market, in academic settings, at restaurants -- are much more likely to respond to you and open up if you greet them in Twi. If you’re lucky, they may even give you an extra tomato or kebab for free!