If I received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of Twi in Ghana I would hope to track the way the dialect changes as the regions change and what parts of the land demarcate linguistic differences, where they begin and end. I want to learn what it is that contributed to some Twi speakers speaking in specific ways and the way Twi interacts with the other main languages that are spoken on the land. I would get started by heading to the region where my family is from because positionality and familiarity are important to establish a baseline that you are comfortable with. From the city of Kumasi, I would then head to the most populous regions of Ghana that are Twi speaking and note the linguistic differences. The word trees would be very helpful because it would allow me to comparatively look at words and if I were to branch out to do a sentence tree, I could also note the syntactic structural differences. I imagine that I would also like to track the different patterns of clothing that are most popular in the region as well. I would love to see if there is some correlation between dialectic differences and the way people use clothing to identify themselves, and to what extent. I know that in some regions of Ghana, parts of Twi that have an “r” in it are changed to an “l”. It is not how I prefer to speak, and that is not how it is written so I would like to figure out what happened there. This might map out some history that we are not privy to know.
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