Speak it, preserve it, pass it on: Why Ghana must save its indigenous languages

Alhassan Betintiche Ziblim, Executive Director of the Ghana Library Authority, 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. He states, "Without deliberate effort to preserve them, the list of lost languages will only grow longer."

Among languages already gone are Boro, once spoken around Worawora and Tapa, which by the end of the 1800s was reduced to a single elderly speaker, with only about a dozen words remaining in old linguistic records. Mprɛ, also called Mpra, died out sometime in the twentieth century, though a few elderly residents could recall bits of it as recently as the early 2000s. Dompo, once spoken in what is now the Bono East Region, is also considered extinct. The Ghana Library Authority's bigger worry is that languages like Nawuri, Tuwuli (Bowiri), Chala, and certain dialects of Anufo (Chakosi) are endangered and could vanish within a generation if young people stop learning and speaking them.