Research on Twi (Akan)

Twi is a variety of Akan (Niger-congo) spoken primarily in Ghana. In 2018, Felix Kpogo and I began working collaboratively under the supervision of Dr. Charles Chang on a research project investigating the way second generation Twi-speakers in the U.S. express diminutive meaning. Specifically, we examined whether English-dominant, second- generation (G2) speakers of Twi in the US would express diminutive meaning in Twi differently from first-generation (G1) speakers.

Twi and English can both express diminutive meaning using a morphological strategy (diminutive suffix) or a syntactic strategy (adjectival construction), but they differ with respect to native-speaker preferences—morphological in Twi, syntactic in English. Each strategy in Twi, moreover, is associated with different types of complexity (morphological, phonological, lexical, discourse-pragmatic, and/or inhibitory). Results from elicited production suggest that G2 does indeed differ from G1 in this respect: whereas G1 relies on the morphological strategy, G2 relies on the syntactic strategy, producing adjectives post-nominally in accordance with Twi syntax. These results are discussed in light of variation in G2 speakers’ morphological awareness and verbal fluency in Twi.

Overall, our findings suggest that both the incremental complexity of linguistic options within a bilingual language repertoire and cross-linguistic influence at the level of preferences play a role in explaining G2’s diminutive production.