Speech rhythm in Akan oral praise poetry

Abstract

This article reports a study of harmonic speech displayed in Akan oral praise poetry (apae). The study demonstrates that the recitation of Akan praise poetry—a fairly free verse form in terms of variable tempo and line length—is highly influenced by an isochronous rhythmic beat. Despite isolated occurrences of relatively long or short non-isochronous metrical accents, these poems are recited in a style that exploits tempo changes and ellipsis to maintain an oscillatory rhythm of beats at harmonic intervals, and this rhythm is found to remain constant through silent rest phases between individual poems as well as between lines. This research supports the notion that considerations of timing should be given more weight in linguistic theory and modeling.