[3] About 80% of Ghana's population speak Akan as a first or second language,[3] and about 44% of Ghanaians are native speakers.
[3] Three dialects were developed as literary standards with distinct orthographies: Asante and Akuapem, collectively known as Twi, and Fante.
[7] The cultures of the descendants of escaped slaves in the interior of Suriname and the Maroons in Jamaica still retain Akan influences, including the Akan naming practice of naming children after the day of the week on which they are born, e.g. Akwasi/Kwasi for a boy or Akosua for a girl born on a Sunday.
[7][8] In history, the Akans who live in Ghana migrated in successive waves between the 11th and 18th centuries.
[11] They migrated from the north to occupy the forest and coastal areas in the south in the 13th century.
[7] Their cultural ideas are expressed in stories and proverbs and also in designs such as symbols used in carvings and on clothes.
[7] The cultural and historic nature of the Akans in Ghana makes it an area of research for various disciplines such as folklore, literary studies, linguistics, anthropology and history.
[12][13] The Akan dialects contain extensive palatalization, vowel harmony, and tone terracing.
Before front vowels, all Asante consonants are palatalized (or labio-palatalized), and the stops are to some extent affricated.
A tongue-root distinction in orthographic a is only found in some subdialects of Fante, but not in the literary form; in Asante and Akuapem there are harmonic allophones of /a/, but neither is ATR.
The nouns which use the 'n' prefix include; adaka (box) to nnaka (boxes), adanko (rabbit) to nnanko (rabbits), aduro (medicine) to nnuro (medicines), atare (dress) to ntare (dresses), odwan (sheep) to nnwan (sheep plural), aduane (food) to nnuane (food plural), kraman (dog) to nkraman (dogs), kanea (light) to nkanea (lights), safoa (key) to nsafoa (keys).
Akan can create plural nouns by adding the suffix nom to the original word.
Nouns such as nkyene (salt), ani (eye), sika (money), etc., are written the same in both singular and plural.
[18] In 1978 the AOC established a common orthography for all of Akan, which is used as the medium of instruction in primary school.