Languages (sign language researchers, please comment)

There are so many languages spoken here! We learn Twi in class (just had an oral exam today, and also presented a "skit" in our groups, which was also a test). It's hard, but I try to use it as much as possible taking Tro-Tros, going to the market, just walking down the street and meeting people. I say as much as I can, and then they say more than I understand and I ask them to repeat it and sometimes I learn something new, other times I'm just confused.

The official language of Ghana is English, but there are (I've heard...) over 60 languages spoken here. As I've mentioned, my host family is from the Volta Region and speaks Ewe. The people we met at the beach were mainly speakers of Ga (but also know Twi and English). So, I learned a bit from them, and I learn a little bit of Ewe from my host family. On TV, the news is presented in English, but they often go out into the city and interview people, and often those interviews are in Twi (possibly in other languages, too, but I've only heard Twi so far). I've also noticed that they sometimes have a little box in the top right of the screen showing a simultaneous sign language interpreter with the news or sports clips or what have you. That's pretty cool. I can't tell which sign language it is because our tv is so small (so the small box is really hard to see) and I don't know much of any sign language so it could be American, British, Ghanaian or anything really. However, it's there!

I've also noticed significant multilingual code-switching. My host family would often have friends or relatives over. One night, my Auntie's brother, who lives in England now but speaks Ewe and Twi had some people over who spoke mainly Twi, but also knew English, and one of them seemed fairly comfortable in Ewe. They would talk in Twi, throw in a few Ewe phrases, toss in some English words (like "traffic" and "twenty kilos" and then quickly jump back into Twi. When they switched to Ewe, a couple of them were really confused and just pretended to follow, sort of. I had no idea what was going on, ever... I could only tell when they switched by their body language and by the lovely labial-velar plosives which Ewe has and Twi lacks.

Everyone I talk to tells me, "Oh, you are learning Twi? And you are trying to learn Ewe? Well, Ewe is hard. Twi is "soft." You can learn Twi in three months! Ewe, it will take you three years."

After looking at wikipedia's chart of Ewe's phonemes, I see why they say that.

I'm hoping to meet with a professor here who does endangered languages research and is planning a project on a language spoken up in the North. We'll see how that goes. We leave for Kumasi on Tuesday and apparently everything is closed this weekend for a national holiday.

p.s. WOW pollution. People burn garbage here all the time. It's disgusting. Worse than LA, sometimes, I think.