THE GA ENGLISH ACCENT

The Ga Accent is a sub-dialect of the broader Ghanaian Accent dialect known to find predominance around the southern strip of the country, specifically Greater Accra Region. Because of Greater Accra’s unique urban orientation and the influx of settlers from other parts of the country, it is often assumed that Ga Accent is gradually waning into the slums where education is quite uncommon.

The Greater Accra Region is the smallest of Ghana's 10 administrative regions in terms of area, occupying a total land surface of 3,245 square kilometers or 1.4 per cent of the total land area of Ghana. In terms of population, however, it is the second most populated region, after the Ashanti Region, with a population of 2,905,726 in 2000, accounting for 15.4 per cent of Ghana’s total population. The Greater Accra region currently harbors the seat of government in Accra.

Linguistically speaking, however, very few features of the Ga English accent also occur elsewhere in the country. What make a Ga English accent stand apart somewhat from the rest of the accents in the country is the strong, noticeable Ga linguistic features that mysteriously finds its way into the speakers’ English Accent. As many might agree, the heavy Ga influence translates noticeably through not just speech, but mannerisms.

As regards speech, most Ga’s are inclined to interchange “h” and “a” in their speech. This makes their mode of pronunciations very confusing to most non-speakers. Words such as air and hair are pronounced interchangeably, so do words like ear and hear as well s heat and eat. This characteristic is actually also present among Yuroba English speakers of Nigeria. History has it that Ga’s migrated from Ile Ife which happens to be one of the central town of the Yurobas.

Another markedly distinct feature is the replacement of the short “i” sound to a heavy “I” sound causing words like hit to sound like “eat” and “fish” like “feesh”. This could be as a result of the heavy of the sounds characteristic of the Ga language. One interstingly unusual feature with the Ga English Accent is the level confidence with which they mispronounce words.