African languages are often overlooked in the world of linguistics—but the continent is home to thousands of unique languages from numerous different families. Though most African countries use a lingua franca—usually English, French, Arabic, or Portuguese—for interethnic communication, most people within these countries speak an indigenous language as their native tongue. That’s certainly true in Ghana, where many people speak English as a lingua franca but use Twi as their first language.
Twi boasts around 17 to 18 million speakers, including second-language speakers. Given that Twi, a dialect continuum of the prominent West African Akan language, is the largest native language in Ghana, many Ghanaians also learn it as a second language, contributing to the large number of speakers. However, despite the local prominence of Twi, it finds little recognition on the global stage, which prefers to focus on European and major Asian languages. That’s why it can be difficult to find translation services for Twi, despite it being one of Africa’s biggest indigenous languages. So, we at TranslationServices.com have decided to help: we’ve put together a professional Twi translation team for anyone who needs it.
If you’re looking for Twi translation services, all you need to do is reach out to us for a free quote!
Let’s explore what kind of language Twi is.
Twi is native primarily to Ghana, situated squarely in West Africa, although a large number of speakers can also be found in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire and Togo. As many as 40% of Twi speakers may be second-language speakers, which still leaves as many as 10 million people counting as native speakers. Since Twi is often considered a collection of prestige dialects of Akan, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s primarily spoken by the Akan people.
Twi is part of the extensive Niger–Congo language family, related to other major West African languages such as Yoruba, Fulani, and Wolof and more distantly to Bantu languages like Swahili. Twi is a tonal language, like many other West African languages, and employs complicated morphology that can be intimidating for learners, such as the multiple avenues to form plural nouns in the language. In some cases, “n” or “mm” may be prefixed to the noun, eliminating the initial vowel (and sometimes consonant) in the singular noun. In some cases, the singular and plural forms are identical.
We’re here to cover all your translation needs to and from Twi.
Twi may sound complicated, but it isn’t to our professional Twi translators. That’s because they’re native speakers passionate about their language. We’re proud to offers translation services both to and from Twi, covering just about any translation need you may have. For example, if you have historical documents, Twi literature, or academic papers in Twi that you’d like to share with the rest of the world, allow our Twi translators to convert them into flowing English. If you’re going in the opposite direction and you’d like to translate English-language material such as business and promotional content, academic material, or entertainment content like books, games, poems, apps, and more into Twi, we can do that, too.
Are you looking for translation services to or from Twi? Just reach out to us to begin your Twi translation project.