Abstract

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to language studies has been applied to languages such as English, French, Russian, Malay, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The indigenous languages in Africa that have gained scholarly attention in NSM studies are Ewe, Fulfulde, Amharic, Likpe, Wolof, Giryama, and Igala. Akan, the most widely spoken language in Ghana, has not been explored. This paper explores the extent to which the translation equivalents of the set of semantic primes are expressible in Akan, with special reference to the Asante Twi dialect. Sentences or sentence fragments that exemplify the allowable grammatical contexts of the NSM primes were used as data. The claim in NSM research is that semantic primes are universal or near-universal meanings that can be expressed as lexical units or morphemes in every language. We found that in Akan, almost all the lexical equivalents correspond in a straightforward manner with the English primes and their syntactic frames. However, the semantic prime moment seems problematic to posit and thus, needs further investigation. The set of NSM semantic primes in the Asante dialect of Akan can serve as a valuable tool for descriptive linguists, especially semanticists, to analyze Akan culture-specific meanings and test their semantic equivalence with the corresponding vocabulary in English and other languages.