Should it be Omanhenes, Amanhenes or Amanhene? - or are they in free variation?

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article will look at the varying plural noun forms found in Akan. The focus will be on Akan nouns referring to persons, and the paper will discuss how these forms appear in Ghanaian English. It argues that in an intense language contact situation, such as pertains in (urban) Ghana, the question as to what is a code-switched item and what is a lexical borrowing is not clear, as many transferred items exhibit either Akan or English plurals and at times a confounding of the two. Some lexical items of obvious ethno-cultural significance cannot easily be classified as of either transfer category, and so code-switching and lexical borrowing might not be as clearly distinguishable as suggested by, for instance, Poplack and Sankoff (1984). It will be argued that the varying plural forms might be best explained in terms of a style-shift using Bell's (1999; 2001) Audience Design framework.