This paper examines the morphophonological processes in the derivation of some female family-names in Akan, a Niger-Congo (Kwa) language through the addition of a male source name and the female morpheme /-baa/. About three main kinds of family-names can be identified in Akan: (i) those usually given to females only, (ii) those gender-neutral, and (iii) those given to males but out of which female counterpart names can be derived. The current paper examines the third type and claims that even though different realizations of the female morpheme are observed, namely [-wa(a)], [-ma(a)], and [-a] to attach to the male source names, there is only one morpheme in the underlying presentation, that is, /-baa/, /-bea/, and /-ba/ for the Asante, Akuapem, and Fante dialects respectively, out of which these three variants are derived. This underlying morpheme manifests differently among the major dialects, which could be one of the points of distinction among them. To account for its different cross-dialectal realizations, it is shown in this paper that the underlying morpheme-initial consonant /-b/ specified for [+consonantal, +labial, −continuant] may acquire nasality at the surface level as in [-maa] through nasal place assimilation. The same consonant may lenite to labial glide [w] intervocalically and surfaces as [-waa]; or may even elide completely in the same context and be realized as [-a]; the underlying segment is systematically neutralized in the Asante dialect. In the Akuapem dialect, on the other hand, this underlying morpheme-initial segment is invariably fully preserved at the surface representation. The case of the Fante dialect resides in the middle of the continuum; i.e. it is non-systematic. The initial segment may or may not be preserved within the same contexts. Based on these observed variations it is concluded that while the other two dialects, especially the Akuapem, can preserve both the place and stricture features values of the underlying Adomako: Morphophonological Analysis of Akan Female Family-Name Formation 2 morpheme-initial /-b/ of the female morpheme, the Asante dialect only preserves the value for the former, and systematically neutralizes that of the latter. This observation is formalized within the Optimality Theory.

This paper examines some morphophonological processes in Akan personal names with focus on the former process. The morphological processes of truncation of some indigenous personal names identified among the Akan (Asante) ethnic group of Ghana are discussed. The paper critically looks at some of these postlexical morpheme boundary processes in some Akan personal names realized in the truncated form when two personal names interact. In naming a child in a typical Akan, specifically in Asante"s custom, a family name is given to the child in addition to his/her "God-given" name or day-name. We observe truncation and some phonological processes such as vowel harmony, compensatory lengthening, etc. at the morpheme boundaries in casual speech context. These morphophonological processes would be analyzed within the Optimality Theory framework where it would be claimed that there is templatic constraint that demands that the base surname minimally surfaces as disyllable irrespective of the syllable size of the base surname. The relatively high ranking of this minimality constraint, we claim in this paper, forces the application of the compensatory lengthening rule to ensure satisfaction of that constraint in the truncated forms.

This paper examines the phenomenon of underapplication of palatalization rule observed in loanword adaptation in Akan, a Niger-Congo (Kwa) language. The phenomenon has been widely studied almost exclusively in the domain of reduplication where palatalization fails in some reduplicants in the context of back consonant + front vowel. Similar failure is observed when adapting some English words into Akan. For instance, a source word 'crack' is adapted as krakɪ but not *kraʨɪ as would be expected in the native grammar. The sequence of k + ɪ would be expected to result in palatalization of the k into tɕ. This is accounted for within the Optimality Theory that while in reduplication palatalization fails due to a high-ranking of OCP(+cor) constraint, in loans adaptation it results from the adapters' bid to attain phonetic match between source words and adapted forms, hence a relatively high ranking of IDENT-IO(cor) constraint over well-formedness constraints.

This paper examines some phonological processes observed in the Pig Latin; a linguistic game played in Akan, a Niger-Congo (Kwa) language. The Akan Pig Latin (henceforth APL), which is popularly known as Megesege is usually played among Akan youth. The purpose of this game varies from concealment to social identity establishment. This paper is a qualitative study of 200 stimuli of sentences in regular Akan constructions manipulated into the APL. The simple rule for playing the game is to syllabify an already existing word and to add a [CV] syllable to each of those segmented syllables. Through this manipulation of existing word, several phonological processes are observed including insertion, syllabification, palatalization etc. The paper presents a descriptive analysis of some of the processes and shows how the study of the APL can facilitate our understanding of the several phonological phenomena in Akan, even though it may display, in many parts, quite different patterns from what obtains in the regular Akan grammar.

In this paper, I examine the phenomenon of reduplicant-nasal deletion observed in some reduplicative prefixes of Akan (a Niger-Congo, Kwa language). In the Akan phonology, nasals are among non-vowel sonorants that are permitted syllable or word-finally (Dolphyne 1988, Abakah 2005). However, it is observed that these nasals, particularly [m], are sometimes deleted in some reduplicants final position. In this paper, I show that verb bases of CVN or CVVN structures are of two different morphemic structures in the underlying representation; monomorphemic verb base and bimorphemic verb base. The latter structure, on which this paper focuses, has the composition: morpheme1 + morpheme2. It is observed that while the former preserve their ‘final’ nasals in the reduplicants, the latter lose them in their reduplicants.  We analyse this phonological phenomenon as resulting from the language’s desire to satisfy a high-ranking template satisfaction constraint (after McCarthy and Prince 1994a) within the Optimality Theory framework. Keywords: Nasal deletion, Akan, reduplication, Optimality Theory, phonology.