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Akan 〔Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh〕 is a Central Tano language that is the principal native language of the Akan people of Ghana, spoken over much of the southern half of that country, by about 58% of the population, and among 30% of the population of Ivory Coast. Three dialects have been developed as literary standards with distinct orthographies: Asante, Akuapem (together called Twi), and Fante, which despite being mutually intelligible were inaccessible in written form to speakers of the other standards. In 1978 the Akan Orthography Committee (AOC) established a common orthography for all of Akan, which is used as the medium of instruction in primary school by speakers of several other Akan languages such as Anyi, Sehwi, Ahanta, and the Guang languages. The Akan Orthography Committee has compiled a unified orthography of 20,000 words. The adinkra symbols are old ideograms. The language came to the Caribbean and South America, notably in Suriname spoken by the Ndyuka and in Jamaica by the Jamaican Maroons known as Coromantee, with enslaved people from the region. The descendants of escaped slaves in the interior of Suriname and the Maroons in Jamaica still use a form of this language, including Akan naming convention, in which children are named after the day of the week on which they are born, e.g. Akwasi/Kwasi (for a boy) or Akosua (girl) born on a Sunday. In Jamaica and Suriname the ''Anansi'' spider stories are well known. ==Relationship to other Central Tano languages== In Ethnologue and ISO 693-3 Akan is a macrolanguage〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Documentation for ISO 639 identifier: aka )〕 that includes Twi and Fante. Akan is also the name of a language group that includes said macrolanguage and also Abron and Wasa.〔(【引用サイトリンク】website=Ethnologue )〕 The language group of Akan is ordered under Central Tano,〔(【引用サイトリンク】website=Ethnologue )〕 which also includes 8 more languages. This means that while they are all related, Abron and Wasa are not seen as dialects of Akan per se, but rather as sister languages. Ethnologue bases its classification on studies of mutual intelligibility and lexical similarity from a multitude of sources.〔(【引用サイトリンク】website=Ethnologue )〕 However, Ethnologue does not always cite all sources and the classification is not final. Glottolog makes basically the same analysis, with the exception that the language group of Akan, which includes Wasa and Abron is labeled "Akanic" and that Akan is analysed as one language with Fante, Asante, Akuapem and many other dialects.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/akan1251 )〕 According to work done by P K Agbedor of CASAS, Mfantse (Fante), Twi (Asante and Akuapem), Abron (Bono), Sefwi (Sehwi), Wassa, Asen, Akwamu, and Kwahu belong to Cluster 1 of the speech forms of Ghana. Clusters are defined by the level of mutual intelligibility. Cluster 1 may better be named r-Akan, which do not explicitly have the letter “l” in their original proper use. On the other hand, l-Akan, refers to the Akan cluster comprising Nzema, Baoulé, Anyin and other dialects spoken mainly in the Ivory Coast, whose use of the letter “r” in proper usage is very rare. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Akan language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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