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Ga Wiemɔ

Words that came into Ga

Ga has been spoken on the Accra plains for centuries. Over that time it took in words from the traders and missionaries who came to the coast, and made them its own. Follow those words home to Accra.

How Portuguese reached Accra

Portuguese came to the Gold Coast in two ways. The first was trade. From the late 1400s into the 1800s, Portuguese was the main language between Africans and Europeans on the coast, and the Portuguese words in the list below come from that long period, as Dakubu shows.

The Tabon, Accra's Brazilian community

The second came with people. In the early 1800s, freed Africans began returning from Brazil to West Africa. Many came from Bahia, where a series of slave revolts culminated in the Malê uprising of 1835, after which many freed Africans were pushed to leave. Oral tradition in Accra says a first group of seven families arrived in 1829, led by Kangidi Asuman, who later took the name Azumah Nelson. Dutch records describe a larger group of about 200 freed people from Bahia who arrived in August 1836.

Kwaku Ankrah, the chief of Otublohum in what was then Dutch Accra, took them in, and they settled in Otublohum. Many of the first families were Hausa Muslims, and they were the first to bring Islam to Accra, though many later became Christians. They brought trades the town valued, among them building and tailoring, and they dug deep wells whose water they shared with their Ga neighbors. They farmed land north of the town, and groves of mango trees in Accra are still remembered as a mark of their farms. Their first house stood on a street that is still called Brazil.

Their name is Portuguese. Tradition says the newcomers, who could not yet speak Ga, answered "Tá bom, tá bom" ("all right, all right") to whatever they were asked, and so they came to be called Tabon. Johannes Zimmermann recorded the name in 1858. He describes the Tabon as "portuguese black emigrants from the Brasils, now living in Akra," says the word means "well," and notes that it also names their quarter and their language. Their religion, he adds, was generally Muslim.

How much Portuguese the Tabon added to Ga is less clear. The linguist Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu doubted that their arrival kept Portuguese alive on the Gold Coast for long. Many of the returnees had not been born in Brazil, she notes, and by the time they came, English was the language traders needed. The one Ga word the sources clearly tie to them is their own name, which Ga speakers still use for the community and its leader, the Tabon Mantse.

Sources

Borrowed words and their sources

Each word below has its origin stated in published scholarship, and the source is named under it. Most borrowed words in Ga are not yet on this list. Zimmermann's words appear in the modern spelling used by this dictionary, which is still a draft, and their meanings are drafts from his 1858 English that a Ga speaker has not yet reviewed.

From Portuguese 35

Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu shows that Portuguese was the main language between Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast from the late 1400s into the 1800s. These Ga forms are from her study.

From Danish 38

Zimmermann marks each of these words as Danish. For most of them he gives no Danish word, so the one shown is our own match and is labeled that way.

From English 7

Zimmermann marks each of these words as English.

From Twi 36

Zimmermann calls Twi Otyi and marks each of these words as coming from it. Where he gives the Twi word, it is shown in his spelling.

From Fante 3

Zimmermann marks each of these words as Fante.

From Ewe 1

Zimmermann calls Ewe Ayigbe.

Where the sources disagree 2

For these words the published sources give different origins, so both are shown.

Sources for this list

Ga and its people

Ga belongs to the Kwa languages, part of the large Niger-Congo family of Africa. Its closest relative is Dangme, the language of the Adangbe peoples to the north and east of Accra, including the Krobo and Ada. Linguists treat the two as one branch, Ga-Dangme, and they share much of their basic vocabulary. Dangme is thought to keep more of the older language from which both descend.

Ga families keep their own traditions about where their ancestors came from, and historians have not settled the question. Accra grew from a series of settlements founded at different times by different peoples, who came to share one Ga identity. Those settlements were flourishing by the 1400s.

The Ga capital then was Ayawaso, inland near present-day Pokuase. Tradition credits its founding to Ayi Kushi. Between about 1677 and 1680, Akwamu forces destroyed it, and the Ga moved to the coast. There they built Ga Mashie, the old heart of Accra.

Missionaries of the Basel Mission wrote Ga down in detail in the 1800s. Johannes Zimmermann's vocabulary of 1858, on which this dictionary is built, shows how Ga was spelled then. He wrote akutšo for the word now spelled akutso, a clan or quarter of a town.

Sources