Last week, I met a young Ghanaian lady whom I later got to know as Shirley in Accra— studying Spanish and hoping to work at the Foreign Affairs ministry.
Shirley spoke English, Twi, Ga and Hausa, and she was paying huge amounts of money to add Spanish to her impressive CV of languages. Though I cannot speak Spanish, I know a few sentences from my regular visits to Spain so I was able to chip in a few sentences during our introduction.
In Ghana, most educated people are bi-lingual; they speak mostly English and their native language. A few others speak more than two languages. My mother for instance fluently speaks English, Twi, Hausa and Dagbani, and my senior brother, a chemistry lecturer speaks English, Twi and Hausa.
Like most Ghanaians, I speak only two languages; Twi and English—but I wish I could speak one more Ghanaian language. I speak Twi because that was what my family spoke at home and with English being the language of instruction in Ghanaian schools, there was no way I could have missed that.
It’s beautiful and important that a person is able to speak at least his own native language—if not for anything at all, for the sake of identity and culture.
However, there is a growing pathetic trend in Ghana where parents are prohibiting their children from speaking any other language apart from English at home—to the extent that children born and growing up in Ghana cannot speak or comprehend any other language except English.