Twi, also known as Akan Kasa, is a dialect of the Akan language spoken in southern and central Ghana by several million people, mainly of the Akan people, the largest of the seventeen major ethnic groups in Ghana. The Niger-Congo languages are the world's third-largest language family in terms of number of speakers and Africa’s largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. It is generally considered to be the world's largest language family in terms of the number of distinct languages. It is the third-largest language family in the world by a number of native speakers, comprising around 700 million people as of 2015. Within Niger-Congo, the Bantu languages alone account for 350 million people, or half the total Niger-Congo speaking population. The most widely spoken Niger-Congo languages by a number of native speakers are Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, and Zulu. The most widely spoken by the total number of speakers is Swahili, which is used as a lingua franca in parts of eastern and southeastern Africa. What ties the languages together in my mind is the way that tone and meaning are tied together, and not in a subtle way, in meaning an entirely different meaning to the sentences. These considerations help me in my understanding of the language by helping me understand the people that speak the language and where African unity lied pre-colonization. For example, knowing that people from Ivory Coast speak Twi sometimes taught me that before colonization that many of us were united under the Ashanti tribe. Languages also change over time by becoming simplified, where originally Twi did not have as many silent letters as it does now. Linguists are able to track these changes by navigating historical texts, as well as gathering the present-day linguistic information from many tribes across the region.
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This was a really interesting post to read! I really liked how you broke it down with the different languages and its population distribution. When you put actual numbers down, it’s actually insane to think about that there’s that many people out there that have the ability to speak the languages they speak. I also enjoyed the point you made about the simplification of languages. That’s really interesting that Twi has silent letters in general, and that they’ve somehow increased as time went by.
I really didn't know that Niger-Congo languages or Bantu languages were so widely spoken, so I'm glad that you posted about this! I find it fascinating how the history of a place and culture are so closely intertwined with the history of a place, and how so much from one sphere can inform another. Did Twi gain more silent letters as it became more simplified? How did that happen, do you know?