I’m learning as I go on a number of fronts, not the least of which is language. Soon after arriving, I learned my first Twi phrase: eti sen? (ehtee sayn, how are you?) to which the appropriate response is eye (ay-yay, fine). I can’t reproduce Twi orthography on this keyboard so you’ll have to accept the anglicized version. After starting strong, my Twi vocabulary building entered a drastic recession, which was especially unfortunate given how little there was to recede from. At the university, everyone speaks English. You hear people conversing in Twi and other languages with regularity, but no one has trouble understanding you or (seems to) holds it against you if you use English. So instead I focused on French.
French will serve a few purposes. Most practically, I’m planning on traveling to Cameroon over the winter holiday. I may want to work in Francophone Africa at some point, so brushing up my very dusty French skills which were never very well polished to begin with seemed like a logical strategy. Additionally, the French Club is very active here, so I’ve used that as an opportunity to meet and interact with other students. My French is improving slowly, but I was reminded that I still have a long way to go the other night when I attended a lecture on writers of the African diaspora delivered by a professor from the Sorbonne. I thought I understood or had at least previously heard 75% of the words he was using, but I was considerably less successful in piecing together their meaning. So I have a few more hours to devote to Radio France Internationale and the works of Leopold Sedar Senghor.
Recently, I’ve realized that although I may not require Twi to survive in Accra, by not studying it, I’m missing something important. My catalyst to start learning was the woman who sells me porridge in the morning. Every day, she would greet me in Twi and then throw out a few extra lines with an expectant look on her face. I felt like she was testing to see how serious I was about being here. I’m serious about being here, so I tracked down a copy of “A Comprehensive course in Twi (Asante)” with the accompanying cassette. I’ve been devoting a little time each day to teaching myself. It’s already made me feel much more connected to this place. The benefits have been, and I expect will continue to be, small, piecemeal, and realized over the long term. And that’s ok with me.
My biggest linguistic surprise has come from the language with which I expected the least trouble. English is English, or so I thought. I’m realizing more and more that even when I’m communicating in English there are subtle gaps in meaning that can often bedevil the conversation. So I’ll think that I’ve scheduled to meet one of my friends at a certain place only to find that he’s somewhere else. Or I’ll plan a route to run with one of the guys on the cross country team only to find out that we meant radically different courses. It’s hard to explain because I don’t understand what’s going on myself. Part of the story is that the vast majority of homes do not speak a European language as their first language. But I don’t want to imply that the gaps in communication are emerging because the people I’m talking to somehow have an inferior grasp of the English language. Quite the contrary. To hazard a terribly speculative guess, I think that languages are systems of meaning and that you impose your mother tongue’s system of meaning onto your new language, but the overlap isn’t perfect.
One final thought on language. Ghana has about forty different ethnic groups. Although a strong plurality of them speak Twi, linguistic fragmentation is a fact of life here as in much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. English as a national language is problematic, but I wonder if without it, would the nation even be possible?
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