Difference between revisions of "Typological Features Template for Akan"

In the following vowels are described under five headings: oral, nasalised, and long vowels, diphthongs, and vowel harmony (or vowel combinations across syllables).

Oral Vowels

Akan has 9 or 10 oral vowels, depending on the dialect: [e,ɔ,a,o,ɛ i,u,ɪ,æ,ʊ ]. Vowel [æ] is only used in Asante and Akuapem. So you can see from the example below that, where Akuapem and Asante use [æ] Fante uses [e]

In the orthography, the letters e and o represent contrastive vowels: e represents [e] and [ɪ], and o represents [o] and [ʊ] as illustrated in the table below.

NB"Ph.Trans" refers to phonetic transcription.

In the example above we observe the occurrence of all 7 vowel letters used in Akan. Vowels carry tone(s). This is discussed later under "Tone".

B. Nasalised Vowels

Nasalisation in Akan can be contrastive (see table below), and as the result of assimilation nasality can spread to following vowels (nkwa: /ŋ̃kʷã/ - 'life'). There are five nasalised vowels in Akan: ἶ, ĩ, ã, ῦ, and ũ

(Dolphyne 1988:4)

NB: Vowels [e, ɛ, ɔ, o] are not normally nasalised in Akan, however [ɛ], and [ɔ] can be nasalised in the Fante dialects when they occur as neighbours with nasal consonants, [m] and [n] in a word or a phrase.

C. Long Vowels

The length of the vowel may determine meaning. Orthographically,long vowels are represented through doubling.

Verbs in Akan are inflected for tense/aspect by lengthening the final vowel. Oral vowels and nasalised vowels except the unadvanced high front vowel [ɪ] can be lengthened (see table below). The asterisks indicates the vowels that can be nasalised.

D. Diphthongs

An example of a diphthong is given below:

Akan has two sets of vowels which are either "advanced tongue root" or "retracted tongue root", that is +ATR and -ATR respectively: . The + Advanced Tongue root vowels are produced by pushing the root of the tongue forward. For the production of the un-advanced tongue root vowels the root of the tongue is retracted or pushed backward.

           Set A(+ATR) [i, e, æ, o, u]

           Set B(-ATR) [ɪ, ɛ, a, ɔ, ʊ]

Under vowel harmony co-occurring vowels are either set A or B vowels.

Harmony Exceptions: There are few words in Akan that deviates from the harmony rule. The unadvanced vowel /a/ is known to usually occur in such words. However /ɛ/ too does deviate sometime. The following are examples of such deviations.

We can see from the above examples that vowels /a/ occurred with the advanced vowels /i, u, o/ and /ɛ/ which is also -ATR, occurred with +ATR vowel /i/.

Akan has 16 consonants: [j, w, p, b, f, d, t, s, m, n, k, kʷ, h, hʷ, g, gʷ]. The table below gives the articulation of these consonants:

Examples: 9 Bilabial consonants

 Example n:
           Akan   English   Akan    English    Akan    English
           /papa/  'father'  /ɔbaa/  'girl'     /maame/  'mother'

 [f] is the only Labio-dental consonant in Akan.
 Example: 10
           Akan   English  
           /fɛrɪ/   'shy'
  

Alveolar consonants:

 Example: 11
           Akan   English   Akan    English    Akan    English
          /atadeɛ/ 'clothe' /sɪrɪ/  'laughs' /ɛnora/  'yesterday'
 
 [hy, hw, ky, gy]