The Executive Director of the Ghana Library Authority, Alhassan Betintiche Ziblim, has raised the alarm, noting that while only a handful of Ghanaian languages have died out comple
The report indicates that ghana’s indigenous languages are disappearing faster than many realise, and the warning signs are growing harder to ignore.
It further notes that the Executive Director of the Ghana Library Authority, Alhassan Betintiche Ziblim, has raised the alarm, noting that while only a handful of Ghanaian languages have died out completely, as many as 40 are now teetering on the edge of extinction.
Without deliberate effort to preserve them, he says, the list of lost languages will only grow longer.
Among those already gone is Boro, once spoken around Worawora and Tapa in the central-eastern part of the country. By the end of the 1800s, the language had been reduced to a single elderly speaker, and today all that remains of it are about a dozen words captured in old linguistic records. Mprɛ, also called Mpra, met a similar fate.
It was once spoken in Butei, a village between Techiman and Tamale, and though the language itself died out sometime in the twentieth century, a few elderly residents were still able to recall bits and pieces of it as recently as the early 2000s.
Then there is Dompo, once the language of a hunter-gatherer community in what is now the Bono East Region. Its speakers have since shifted almost entirely to Akan, and the language is now considered extinct.
But the bigger worry, according to the Ghana Library Authority, is what comes next. Languages such as Nawuri, Tuwuli (also known as Bowiri), Chala, and certain dialects of Anufo (Chakosi) are all endangered, and could vanish within a generation if young people stop learning and speaking them.
It is not just a Ghanaian problem, either; dozens of indigenous languages across the African continent have already been lost, a sobering reminder that this is not some distant, hypothetical threat but something happening in real time.
Interestingly, not everyone agrees on exactly how many languages have been lost. Ethnologue, one of the most widely used language databases in the world, tends to be far more conservative in its classifications and lists fewer extinct Ghanaian languages than local researchers do.
The disagreement often comes down to how strictly “extinct” is defined, particularly in cases where a language survives only in the memory of a few elderly semi-speakers.
The conversation around Ghana’s local languages inevitably turns to Hausa as well. Hausa’s historical roots lie in what is now northern Nigeria and southern Niger, and it is generally regarded as a major West African language rather than a Ghanaian one.
Yet legendary media personalities such as Alhaji A. R. Gomda and Alhaji Baba Sheriff have long argued that centuries of settlement and continuous use have earned Hausa a rightful place among Ghana’s own languages.
It is, after all, spoken widely in Zongo communities across the country and remains one of the most common languages of inter-ethnic communication here.
Hausa’s spread through Ghana has deep historical roots, such as trade routes, migration, and the colonial-era recruitment of soldiers from northern Nigeria into what would become the Ghana Armed Forces all played a part.
