Twinglish: Why Ghanaians Speak the Way They Do

When I asked my eleven-year old nephew when he’d be vacating from school, he said, “Next week Thursday.” I asked him if he had started taking exams. He answered in the negative, and added, “Wednesday, that is when we will start.” It could have ended there. But if you are I, that statement comes to you with a great deal of weight. It is a punch I’ve learned to dodge many times already. Gone are the days when I used to be repulsed at the phenomenon I’m about to tell you about. These days I accept it, for better or worse, as a part of our language cloud as Ghanaians; as one of our own “Englishes,” as recent linguistic scholars are beginning to say.

But rather than just tell you its name and describe its parts, let’s put the little boy’s answer on the examination bench for a little while, and dissect it. On the surface, the cadaver looks normal. The statement is grammatically correct. Indeed, if you did not know better you might even be impressed with the choice of the phrasing. Most people would have said, “We’ll start on Wednesday.” Indeed, most Ghanaians would have said, wrongly, “We’d start on Wednesday.” But the little boy goes for “Wednesday, that is when we will start.” It is the construction of a writer, tense with drama. Wednesday is suddenly a D-day… the far demonstrative pronoun “that” adds the effect of a special note, of pointing to that great day of days. There’s a sense of foreboding invested in “Wednesday.” But I knew better. I knew the less than creative, highly haphazard and accidental source of this fake glitter.

And what is the source, you wonder? Hold on a minute. Let’s do this slowly, and soon it should become clear to you. If it isn’t by the end of our short journey, fret not, I shall tell you with plain words.

Things Ghanaians Say

Ghanaians say a lot of strange sounding things to the purely English ear. My good friend Delalorm has written excellently, I believe with no small degree of cringing, on some common phrases he finds most irritating. I myself have recently released a book exploring our beloved Pidgin English in all its intricate detail. Today, though, our attention is not so much on what we say as Ghanaians, as on how we come to say it that way. The aim of this article is that the next time you hear a strangely constructed phrase from the lips of a Ghanaian, you may successfully reconstruct the very mind of the speaker, and know them better than they know themselves, at least as far as their language process. But to do this, we will use a number of phrases as a vehicle to our end. Consider, for example:

They see themselves — Of course they do, if they have functioning eyes. Once again, just like my nephew’s words, there is nothing grammatically incorrect about this statement. Nothing, that is, until you factor that what the person who said this to me actually meant to say was that “They” are proud and arrogant. Yes, you heard me. How did they go from there to the phrase they actually pronounced? Be patient.

Something? — Yes, something. Everything, actually! You hear this phrase when a Ghanaian means to ask you if there is something more to or wrong with a given situation. It’s equivalent is “Is something the matter?” For example, you might ask, “Mansah, where is your husband?” Mansah might respond, “He’s gone to the office. Why, something?” That’s not the end of it.

Some times are there — Who has not heard this phrase? Usual context is when someone wants to justify a particular action that they find justifiable given the seriousness of a given situation. “Some times are there, we don’t play around, oo.” Or when they just mean to refer ordinarily to the meaning in “There are times when.” Indeed that is the precise English phrase they are going for.

Under the programme — One day a friend told me he’d really needed to talk to me about something. He had searched everywhere for me and finally found me at a function. He would have come straight for me, but he didn’t want to disturb me because I was “under the programme.” My response, understandably: “Say what?!”

I kid you not. We — well, a great many of us—say these things all the time. To our Ghanaian ears it sounds normal. But the uninitiated are often befuddled. The puritans like myself cringe. So what internal mental process is producing such aberrant specimens of the English language, correct enough to be tolerated as English, but too crude to be productively emulated? On close examination, one must conclude that while they are indeed English phrases, the speakers are certainly not speaking English at all when they speak them. No, they are speaking something else entirely: they are speaking Twi, and merely using English words to do so. I call it Twinglish. The term is not original. Some use it to refer merely to a mixing of Twi and English words during speech. Here, however, we mean something more nuanced. Twinglish here refers to the often subliminal influence of the Twi language over the choice of English words used during communication. Here’s how it works. The four phrases we’ve seen are actually produced thusly:

“They see themselves” is a direct translation of “Wɔmo hu wɔmo ho”

“Something?” is from “Biribi anaa?”

“Some times are there” is from “Mmre bi wɔ hɔ a…”

“You were under the program” is from “na wohyε program n’ase”

The occurrence of this phenomenon in the speech of the ordinary Ghanaian is pervasive. I dare say we are all infected with it, even the most pristine of English speakers among us. Over my short career observing the phenomenon of Twinglish, I have heard so many intriguingly hilarious expressions. Here is a small sample I have collected over the past few years.

“Those of us who cannot hear the Twi,” when the person really meant to say “Those of us who cannot understand the Twi.” Of course, that is how it would have been said if they were speaking Twi: “Yεn a yεnte Twi no.”

“Use it to Whatsapp me.” In Twi, “Fa whatsaape me” would have been a very natural thing to say. The statement means “Send it to me via Whatsapp.”

Who has not heard in the course of a doling out of sage advice, of “Things that if we stop it will be good”? The phrase is from “Nneεma bi a, anka yegyaee a, anka εbε yε yie.” Basically, it refers to things we should stop doing.

Before the commemorative GHC 5 bill was introduced, a politically active friend said to me “They are about to cut a new currency.” Of course, in his native Twi he would have said it precisely like that. “Wɔmoo betwa sika foforɔ.”

I heard someone recently say to a mate in a trɔtrɔ, that if he didn’t stop trying to cheat passengers, “It will not end you well.” Of course, you recognise in that the Twi processing: “Ensi wo yiye.”

As for this next example, don’t tell me you’ve “never seen some before.” This translation of “wonhuu bi da” is a very common one. In fact, the word “some” is used often where “this” or “it” is required. “Wow, what a nice car! I’ve never seen some before.” In Twi, “Menhuu bi da” is perfect, because the indefinite “bi” communicates a class or category that is wholly alien or new to the speaker. But in English it just doesn’t work, does it?

Sometimes Twinglish is that easy to recognize; glaring if it meets your eyes on a page (poor teachers) and screeching if it falls on your ears. But very often the influence of Twi on our language is much less perceptible. Consider the phrase: “It’s not you alone.”

What could be wrong there? Often you’ll hear this after you’ve made a sort of complaint. For example,

- “I wish I didn’t come to this meeting. It’s boring.”

- “Hmm. It’s not you alone.”

The Twinglish is detected if you only ask yourself, how would a regular English speaker have normally said this? Likely, “You’re not the only one.” After that you only need to ask why Ghanaians so consistently say “It’s not you alone” to realise that we are directly translating “Εnyε wo nkoa.”

Take also “He knew I was asleep.” Another phrase that sounds no alarms until one considers context. If a person says, “He came in and stole the money; he knew I was asleep,” you know something is wrong. Philosophers define knowledge as justified true belief. In simple terms knowledge is certainty of truth. What the person actually means to communicate is belief or assumption. Kofi came in and stole the money because he thought the speaker was asleep. In Twi, however, the standard rendition would be “Na onim sε m’ada,” even though there is the more appropriate “Na wɔdwen sε m’ada.” Τhis one is very, very common indeed; so common I’d advise that whenever you hear a Ghanaian use the word “knew” in narrative situations, always be on the lookout.

There are also phrasings that are taking on a new regularity. For example, whenever you hear a Ghanaian make a statement in which they refer to a singular countable noun without an article of any kind, you need to smell a fish. Often what is proper is actually the article, or the plural form of the noun. For example, I’ve been asked:

“Please, where can I get glue gun to buy?”

“Pakyew, m’anya glue gun atɔ wɔ he?”

“As for me, I don’t fear gun.”

“Me deε mensuro tuo.”

It’s these imperceptible — or at least difficult to notice — forms, that are most concerning. That’s because, unlike Pidgin English, which is spoken deliberately and in conformity with the knowledge that it is different from regular English, Twinglish amounts to no more than a string of unconscious speaking errors that sometimes cloud meaning and hamper communication. I would argue that Twinglish amounts to what I describe in Master the Pidgin as “broken English.” Because of this difference, Twinglish reflects ignorance and carelessness, rather than any conscious attempt to challenge the linguistic status quo. It is a bundling together of ancient bad attempts at English into the tongues of an unsuspecting present generation.

I’ll leave you with some more examples you can enjoy — but hopefully not repeat!

· If I do you some will you be happy?

Meyε wo bi a, w’ani bεgye?

Intended: Would you be happy if I did the same to you?

· What we will say is that…

Nea yεbεka ne sε…

Intended: We’ll put it down to…

· The book is holding him

Book no kita no

Intended: He is holding the book. Depending on the noun used, it may signify possession in a more general sense. For example, “Car no kita no” means “She has possession of the car.”

· Now before it’s 3:30

Afei na abɔ 3:30

Intended: It just struck 3:30

· Which taxi will I send home?

Taxi bεn na mede bεkɔ fie?

Intended: How will I get a taxi to go home? Usually late at night when transport is scarce

· They have built some of this thing at our place

“Womo asi adeε wei bi wɔ yεn hɔ”

Intended: There’s a similar building being built in our neighborhood

· She’s not bothered as well

Εnha no nsoso

Intended: On top of that she isn’t bothered

· Are there still some?

Ebi daso wɔ hɔ?

Intended: Are there any left?

· They just want to take us money.

Wɔmo pεsε wɔmo gye yεn sika kεkε

Intended: They just want to extort money from us

· Like that?

Saa?

Intended: Oh, is that how it is?

· Is that how you are?

Saa na woteε?

Intended: Usually an expression of surprise at a person’s behaviour. For example, “I didn’t think you were capable of that!”

· I see it to be that

Mee mehu ne sεεε…

Intended: I believe… or I think… or The way I see it…

· My friend Delalorm is particularly irked by the phrase “From today onward going…” or sometimes simply “From today going…” which our mothers often shout down to us with pointed fingers, warning that “From today onwards” we should desist from whatever fiendishness we had the misfortune to have been discovered in. “Efri ’ndε εεko yi…”

· He doesn’t like “I will climb the car” either. After all, those who say so actually mean to say that they will “board,” or “get into,” the car.” But you know, “Mεforo car no,” so what can we say?

Conclusion

So there you have it. Some will hate it; some too will love it.[1] Others like me will put their hands in their pockets and look on at the changing world… look on at our nephews who carelessly translate “Wednesday na yεbε hyε aseε,” and end up by sheer accident sounding like George Bernard Shaw.

The inescapable reality is that my nephew isn’t’ even Twi. He did not say what he said because he was personally thinking in Twi. No; rather he was simply regurgitating what he has heard from others who are thinking in Twi. His young spongy mind is inheriting the linguistic legacy of a society dominated by Twi speakers, and an educational system that, quite truly, has failed to teach us proper English.

I fully support societies taking a language and making it their own by linguistic infusion: which language was not created this way? Perhaps Twinglish is on its way there. But if it is then it has a really long way left to go. Until then it does sound rather terrible to the ear that can hear the difference. So with our hands in our pockets we will keep our distance and watch it go, accepting that Twinglish is here to stay, for better or worse. Even the children have caught the disease. Or how do you see it? Sorry — I mean, what do you think?

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[1] I hope you caught this one: Ebi bεpε, ebi nso bεkyi :-)

If you enjoyed this, you should definitely check out my new book, Master the Pidgin, An Elementary Grammar of Ghanaian Pidgin English

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About the Author:

Agana-Nsiire Agana is an author, poet, and essayist born and raised in Ghana. Agana has been active in Ghana’s literary scene since 2004, publishing and performing poetry online and on radio. Agana has published short stories and essays on local and international literary magazines and websites. In 2011 His poem A Bird in Me Heart, was reviewed for Ghana Literary Week, and in 2017 his short story The Message was featured in TheWrongQuarterly, a UK-based literary magazine. In 2018 he authored Master the Pidgin, An Introductory Grammar of Ghanaian Pidgin English. A trained theologian, Agana has published numerous articles on theology and philosophy in various journals and magazines. In his spare time a birdwatcher and nature photographer. He can be reached via his website at www.aganansiire.com or by email at agana@aganansiire.com.