Ghanaian English: phonology

Historical background

Ghana is a coastal West African country with a population of about 19 million (2000 census). The majority is concentrated in the southern, more fertile and developed part of the country, with Ashanti Region, Greater Accra, and Eastern Region the most populous administrative units. Population density is quite high in the southern urbanized centres, especially around the capital Accra, which is the major focus of Ghana’s internal migration.

Direct contact with Europeans goes back to 1471, when the Portuguese made their first landfall on what soon came to be known as the Gold Coast of Africa, at the mouth of the Pra river. In their progress along the West African coast, the primary objective of the Portuguese had been to find a trade route to India, but the availability of gold, ivory and slaves made trade with West Africa very lucrative and soon attracted other European powers as well. Afro-European contact on the Gold Coast can conveniently be divided into three major phases: early trading contacts (1471–1844), colonization (1844–1957), and independence and after (1957–).

The trading phase was characterized by growing European competition. The Portuguese hegemony was broken by the Dutch in the first half of the 17^th century, and other European powers followed in their wake: French, English, Swedish, Danish, and Brandenburger merchants all claimed their share of the Guinea trade. English traders had arrived as early as 1553, and their ships regularly visited the Gold Coast up to the 1570s, when they temporarily seemed to have lost interest in that part of West Africa. In 1632, the Company of Merchants Trading on Guinea established the first English trading post on land, at Kormantin. More trading posts, fortified and unfortified, followed in the second half of the century. The biggest among them was Cape Coast Castle, which from 1665 to 1877, that is well into the colonial period, would remain the English headquarters. This early phase of Afro-European contact was characterized by trade between equal partners. No territorial claims were made by the Europeans, who either traded from shipboard or kept to their trading posts. In fact, it was not uncommon for the merchants to pay ground rent and taxes to the local chiefs.

The early phase of British colonization began in 1844, when the chiefs of the south-western Gold Coast signed an agreement with Governor George Maclean at Cape Coast Castle. It had long been the custom that legal cases in the villages surrounding larger European trading posts were tried before the commanders of these forts or castles. But in the Bond of 1844, the chiefs for the first time formally yielded some of their juridical power to the British crown. Christian missionary societies had become active on the Gold Coast in the 1830s, so these decades saw an increasing involvement of Europeans in local affairs and a territorial expansion of European influence.

After the withdrawal of the Dutch, the only remaining competitors, the British, proclaimed the coastal strip a colony in 1874. Three years later, the capital was moved from Cape Coast to Accra. During the first decades of the Gold Coast Colony, Britain waged several wars against the Ashanti, the powerful Akan state in the hinterland. The British suffered several losses but in 1901 proclaimed Ashantiland and the Northern Territories protectorates, and in 1922 incorporated British Togoland in the colony as a League of Nations mandate. These territories together constitute the modern Republic of Ghana. As the first state in colonial Africa, Ghana achieved independence in 1957.

From as early as the 17^th century, Africans received English instruction in schools set up in or around the trading posts, but since the number of pupils was small and schools were often discontinued, the role of English on the coast remained insignificant. Cape Coast advanced to become the main centre of British education early in the 19^th century and produced African teachers that staffed schools elsewhere on the Gold Coast. However, the absolute number of literate users of English remained very low. The increasing number of missionary schools did not much change this situation, since many of these schools taught in African languages.

Not before the 1880s did the colonial administration start to set up English medium government schools. The 1882 Education Ordinance encouraged missionary schools to teach in English and a dual language policy was pursued until 1925: the Wesleyan and the government schools used English as a medium of instruction whereas the Basel and Bremen mission schools used the local language, Twi and Ewe respectively. The 1925 Education Ordinance made the use of the local language as the medium of instruction compulsory at the Primary level P1–P3 while English was to be taught as a subject. From P4 to P6, English was the medium of instruction, whereas the local language was taught as a subject. On the whole, Ghanaian language policy has ever since vacillated between the basic tenets of the 1925 Education Ordinance and the wish to push English as a medium of instruction from P1. The 1951 Accelerated Development Plan for Education led to the rapid increase of primary schools throughout the country. The resulting shortage of staff meant that primary school leavers had to be employed as teachers. Coupled with the fact that the Plan provided for an early transition from African languages to English as the medium of instruction, this had serious consequences for the quality of English. Nevertheless, colonial rule established English as the language of higher-level education, government, administration, and jurisdiction.

Since 1970 the policy has been to use the local languages in the first three years of schooling and to teach in English thereafter. Actual practice varies widely, though, with schools in multilingual urban areas switching to English much earlier than schools in linguistically less complex rural areas. In 2001 the latest language policy was issued. English is now to be the only medium of instruction from P1 and throughout the educational system. The general opinion among linguists and language pedagogues in Ghana is that this does not favor a good standard of English.

Since almost all Ghanaians acquire their English in school, literacy can serve as a rough indicator of the spread and quality of English. It has increased steadily from a mere fifth of Ghanaians aged 15+ in 1962 to two thirds at the turn of the millennium, but its quality varies widely, from native-like fluency to broken varieties.