Sources

The words

• Johannes Zimmermann's Ga vocabulary, 1858

  J. Zimmermann, A Grammatical Sketch of the Akra- or Gã-Language, volume 2, the vocabulary. Stuttgart, 1858. Most entries in the dictionary come from it. His spellings are turned into modern Ga spelling by fixed rules, and each word page shows how he wrote the word, with his page number.

  Public domain. Scans: archive.org (Bavarian State Library copy), with pages 66 and 67 from a second copy.

• The English, Twi and Ga dictionary, 1874

  J. G. Christaller, C. W. Locher and J. Zimmermann, A Dictionary, English, Tshi (Asante), Akra. Basel, 1874. Its English headwords make the dictionary searchable in English, and its Ga words that were missing are waiting for review. Four pages (94, 95, 130 and 131) are missing from the scans and have not been read yet.

  Public domain. Scans: archive.org, with pages 228, 229 and 246 from the University of Ghana's copy.

• The old Ga Bible

  A nineteenth-century printing of the Bible in Ga, in the old spelling, from a scanned text. Draft meanings for common words were worked out from how they are used in it, lined up with the English of the World English Bible. These entries are marked as drafts until a Ga speaker reviews them.

  Public domain. The World English Bible is also in the public domain.

• Ga speakers

  Ga speakers review the drafts on the review page and add words of their own. Their names are on the About page. Words that people suggest go in only after a Ga speaker has checked them.

  Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0: anyone may reuse them with credit to the dictionary, under the same licence.

Word origins

Each origin on the Word origins page names the published source it comes from, with its page. Most come from Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu's study of Portuguese words in Ga, in the Ghana Journal of Linguistics 1.1 (2012), and from Zimmermann's own notes on Danish and other European words. Origins given by a Ga speaker say so on the word page.

Ga Samai

The meanings of the symbols come mainly from S. Aryee, Semiotic study of Ga traditional symbols in some selected palaces (MPhil thesis, University of Education, Winneba, 2023), and from a chart of Ga Samai shared among Ga people. The Ga Samai page lists all its sources.

Pictures, maps and type

• Drawings

  The Ga Samai drawings and the kids' corner pictures were drawn for this site with an image tool (Higgsfield). The Samai drawings follow the forms Aryee recorded.

• Maps

  The small town maps on the Ga Samai page follow today's district boundaries. The globe on the Word origins page uses Natural Earth, which is in the public domain.

  District boundaries © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License.

• Wiemo Sans

  The site's typeface is our adaptation of Overpass for Ga, drawn so that ɛ, ɔ and ŋ, and the capital Ŋ, look right.

  Overpass and Wiemo Sans are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

If you know a source we should add, or see something credited wrongly, tell us.