About Ga Wiemɔ

Why this project

Ga is my mother tongue, and publishing a Ga dictionary is something I have wanted to do for many years. Fewer young people are growing up speaking Ga well. Many Ga children now grow up in Accra homes where English comes first, and many more are growing up in the diaspora, far from home.

The idea first came to me in 2018, when I first saw Johannes Zimmermann's Ga vocabulary from 1858. I could see what that book could become, but work and life got in the way, and the job was too big for one person with a full-time career. That changed when AI models became able to help with the heavy lifting, like reading old pages and comparing thousands of verses. In October 2026, eight years after first seeing the book, I finally started.

I want every Ga child, and every adult learning Ga, to have one place where they can look up a word and, soon, hear it spoken. I also want them to learn where each word came from, because the words themselves carry the history of the Ga coast.

The dictionary is free, and it is built to grow beyond what any one person knows. Ga speakers everywhere can suggest words and corrections, and in time they will be able to record how each word sounds.

Reading a dictionary from 1858

The dictionary starts from the work of Johannes Zimmermann, a Basel Mission missionary who published a Ga vocabulary in 1858. Because it is more than 160 years old, anyone may use it. We have now read all 384 pages of it, 9,216 entries in all.

The scans came with text a computer could read, but that text was wrong in the places that matter most. It dropped the small marks under and over letters that carry meaning in Ga, so abẹ (proverb) came through as "abe". We read the page images instead, letter by letter.

Zimmermann also wrote Ga differently from today. We turn his spelling into modern Ga with a small set of rules, for example:

The mystery letter. The old Ga Bible uses a letter that scanners read as a long "s" or an "f". The rules could not make sense of it until I recognized ſane as shwane, the word for daytime. On its own the letter means shw. After d it means jw, and after t it means tsw. When it turned ſa ehe into shwa ehe, I could confirm that it means "he regretted", exactly as in Genesis 6:6.

Every rule is tested on real words before it is used, and the tests run again whenever a rule changes.

The whole Ga Bible

The Ga Bible is one of the largest bodies of written Ga. We found the complete Bible in the old Basel Mission spelling, all 66 books and 31,142 verses, and lined up each verse with the matching verse of the World English Bible, a free English translation. The old printers helped without knowing it: wherever their verse numbers differ from English Bibles, they printed the English number in brackets. In the end 31,059 verses lined up, 99.7% of them.

The Bible showed which common words the dictionary still lacked, and it gave draft meanings for 525 of them. It also checks old entries. Zimmermann's kobɔfo (vagabond) is what Cain becomes in Genesis 4:12.

The translators made choices that show their readers' world. In Genesis 3:7, Adam and Eve sew fig leaves together, but the Ga Bible gives akwadubai, banana leaves. Zimmermann wrote that hardly any kind of fig on the coast was edible, which may be why the translators chose a leaf every Ga reader knew.

A second dictionary, from 1874

In 1874 Christaller, Locher and Zimmermann published an English, Twi and Ga dictionary. We read its Ga for all 5,042 English headwords. It lets you search this dictionary in English, and it added 3,481 Ga words that were missing, which are now waiting for review.

Where Ga words came from

Centuries of trade on the Gold Coast left words from Europe in Ga. Every origin in the dictionary names its source, so readers can tell a recorded fact from a guess.

Some of these origins I discovered on my own travels. In Brazil, I heard the Portuguese word cebola for onion and suddenly recognized our own sabolai in it. Moments like that have shown me that Ga is, in a sense, a global language. Its everyday words carry pieces of the wider world, brought to the Ga coast over centuries of trade and contact, and I hope this dictionary lets every reader discover them too.

One Bible verse shows how deep this history runs. In Numbers 11:5, the Israelites remember the food they ate in Egypt. The Ga Bible lists agorigoi (cucumbers, from Danish) and sabolaai (onions, from Portuguese) side by side. See more on the Word origins page.

A font that can write Ga

Most fonts cannot write Ga. We tested 105 free fonts for the six letters Ga needs beyond English, ɛ, ɔ and ŋ and their capitals Ɛ, Ɔ and Ŋ. Only 20 could draw all six.

The capital Ŋ raised a second problem. Fonts draw it in two shapes. One looks like an N with a hook, the form used for the Sami languages of northern Europe. The other is a large version of the lowercase ŋ, the form used for Ga and other African languages. I liked Overpass, a clear font based on the lettering of American road signs, by Delve Withrington, Dave Bailey and Thomas Jockin for Red Hat, but its capital Ŋ was the Sami shape.

Overpass is free under the SIL Open Font License, which allows changes, so we made our own version, Wiemo Sans. Its capital Ŋ is redrawn from the lowercase ŋ, and its capitals Ɛ and Ɔ are spaced properly. It stays free, so other Ga writers and designers can use it too.

Doing it the right way

A dictionary is only as good as the trust people place in it, so every entry shows where it came from and whether a Ga speaker has checked it.

• Sources. Zimmermann's vocabulary, the 1874 dictionary and the old Ga Bible are out of copyright, and the World English Bible is in the public domain. The Sources page lists everything we use.
• Sources we asked about. kasahorow publishes a modern Ga dictionary for personal use, so we did not copy any of its entries and wrote to ask about working together instead. We also wrote to the Bible Society of Ghana to ask permission to use verses from its modern Ga Bible, with full credit.
• Folk tales. The old tales belong to everyone, but each published retelling belongs to its author. Story time will use Zimmermann's Ga texts from 1858 and recordings made with each storyteller's permission.
• Children. The kids' corner has no ads and no sign-in, and it collects nothing about children.
• How the work is done. Much of the technical work was done with Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, including reading the old pages, writing the spelling rules, lining up the Bible and building the font. That help is what finally made the project possible to start. Still, no meaning goes on the site as reviewed until a Ga speaker has checked it.

Who checks the words

Nii Ayertei Tettey, a Ga speaker, makes the final decision on every entry. Other Ga speakers review words on a private review page, and every answer they give comes to Nii before anything changes. If you are a Ga speaker and would like to help review, get in touch.

So far

Words on the site

1,011

Reviewed by a Ga speaker

175

Entries read from Zimmermann, 1858

9,216

English headwords from 1874

5,042

Bible verses lined up with English

31,059

Zimmermann's words and the 1874 words go on the site once a Ga speaker has reviewed them, so the first number grows as reviewing goes on.