[7] Akuapem's orthography was first developed by missionaries at the Gold Coast Basel Mission in 1842,[8] but its written history begins in 1853 with the publication of two grammars, the German Elemente des Akwapim Dialects der Odshi Sprache and the English Grammatical Outline and Vocabulary of the Oji Language with especial reference to the Akwapim Dialect, both written by Hans Nicolai Riis, nephew of the Gold Coast Basel Mission's founder Andreas Riis.
Both were written by the Gold Coast Basel Mission, principally by German missionary and linguist Johann Gottlieb Christaller and native Akan linguists and missionaries David Asante, Theophilus Opoku, Jonathan Palmer Bekoe, and Paul Keteku.
For instance, when British officer Sir Garnet Wolseley, who was and still is known in Ghana as "Sargrenti" (a corruption of "Sir Garnet"),[13] began his campaign into Ghana during the Third Anglo-Ashanti War in 1873, he intended to address his summons to war to Asante king Kofi Karikari in English and Asante, only to find that, to their knowledge, "no proper written representation of the Fante or Asante dialect existed", delaying the dispatch of the summons for almost two weeks; all this even though an Akuapem New Testament had existed for three years and the entire Bible for two.
[citation needed] Akuapem dialect has a ten-vowel system with a two-way distinction based on what has traditionally been analyzed as advanced tongue root, but which may be more accurately described as an expanded pharynx.
[citation needed][The original source did not clarify what 'ao' meant; the other diphthongs have been corrected per ATR] In his 1865 collection, Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,[16] Richard Francis Burton published over 250 Twi (Oji) proverbs and sayings with English translations, taken from Hans Nicolaus Riis's Grammatical Outline and Vocabulary of the Oji-language[17] published in 1854.