Twinglish - why do we find it hard to speak near-perfect local languages?

abocco

So I know we have discussed the issue of English or Twi as a national language countless times, and some of us have strong urges for the use of our local languages on a more official level.
But let's come down to our daily lives and the non-official times language comes into question.

Why do we mix so many English words in our Twi, Ga, Ewe, Dagbani, etc conversations?
Is it a subconscious thing or the environments we are in do not allow us to speak good Twi like we wanted to?
Are we just ignorant and have a terrible command of our own languages?
Do we not have some words/translations in our local languages - like president, opportunities, plane, criticize, etc?

***************
My inspiration for this topic came from listening to Adom FM's "De a mahunu" (what I have seen) political talk show (Tuesday, 10pm Ghana time). This was supposed to be a local language show, and the host simply couldn't string a sentence in Twi together, using words like President, region, travel that have Twi translations.

Submitted by abocco on Tue, 04/18/2006 - 23:29.

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OMANBA

Twi-English local dialect palaver

The issue is plain and simple...We are not very conversant with the lingo. What we know we do speak, and then where there are glitches we just switch to 'brofo'
It's certainly not our fault. Our generation was born after decades of influence of the Oburoni so the English lingo was prevalent in the society we were born into. Hence we learnt the official Language - English plus our local dialects but not everything. But if blame is to be apportioned i will blame my parents first. They focused too much on me learning to speak like a British Parrot.

The evidence is in when you speak to the grand and great grand parents. They have names for things which baffle us when they speak and likewise they dont think much of our 'abrofosem'
I personally gave up trying to mention 'cooler' to my grand-dad whenever i visited him in the village and he asked me to pour him a cup of water from the beautiful brown earthern ware urn with the sleek shape, because he kept telling me what an 'Okurasini' i was by not pronouncing it as 'enyina'(water pot).
And on the few occasions when i had sat hugging his feet for ananse stories, he had been kind enough to teach me how to pronounce certain things in my native Twi which i was spell bounded by.

But it isn't all our fault or our parents. A lot of things have crept into society and stayed since the influx of slavery, colonialism and global mergers. And the fact that they were all new to our then existing culture, we have adapted to them and can only pronounce them the way the originators do.
Neither are we alone in this dilemma as Ghanaians; i think when you look at all languages, adaptations have been made from others. The oxford dictionary is full of French, Latin and Hebrew words and so on.
Still, there is no excuse for the talk show host you mentioned to behave the way he or she did. That is just plain 'Abrofosem' and pretense. They could have done their homework well before going on air by doing a research on how to pronounce certain words in Akan.

Thu, 11/23/2006 - 23:24

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Twinglish - why do we find it hard to speak near-perfect local languages?

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Twi-English local dialect palaver

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