Re-thinking everyday metaphors through Indigenous Ghanaian languages

Abstract

The purpose of this Special Issue is to expand our understanding of conceptual metaphors in six of Ghana’s Indigenous languages: Asante-Twi, Gonja, Likpakpaln, Mfantse, Nzema, and Safaliba. The authors bring new knowledge to the international community from these understudied languages, which may become inaccessible in the not too distant future, particularly those from oral sources, given Ghana’s political embrace of neoliberal global flows of people, goods, and information which expands the reaches of language shift. Nevertheless, the specific metaphor data from the languages in this Special Issue represent the first preliminary examples of documentation and hence are of foundational significance, as the data generate new understandings.