Forming Plural Nouns in Akan (Twi)

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We have already familiarised ourselves with Akan (Twi) Nouns. We went on to look at the various types of Twi nouns in the subsequent lessons, giving examples in each case. Now, how do we form the plural noun in Twi?   The present lesson seeks to show you a number of ways by which plural nouns are formed in Twi. I will try to present this lesson in a very simple manner. If you discover some interesting patterns between the noun groups below or have extra plural formation mechanisms which are not included in the lesson, please share the knowledge with us, as well as other readers by leaving them in the comments section below the post.

Let’s begin.

1. Quite often, nouns with the prefixes “ɔ”, “ɛ”, and some without prefixes form their plural forms by substituting the “ɔ” and “ɛ” prefixes, or prefixing the non-prefixed nouns with “a”. Let’s see some examples below:

2. Most nouns which have their roots (the word minus affixes) beginning with the letter “b” form their plurals by replacing their existing prefixes with “m”. If the word is originally without a prefix, we still prefix it with “m”. For instance, “abranteɛ (young man)” becomes “mbranteɛ (young men)”. But no! In Twi, when the letter “m” directly precedes a “b”, assimilation takes place. We will talk about that in a future lesson but to give you an idea, it is a phonological process by which one sound becomes more like a nearby sound. So, when “m” is prefixed to our example “m-branteɛ”, the “b” changes to become like the prefix. So we get “mmranteɛ” instead. Let’s see some examples.

3. Similar to the noun group above, most nouns which have their roots beginning with the letter “d” form their plurals by substituting their existing prefixes with the letter “n”. The “n” prefix is mostly introduced even if the word originally wasn’t prefixed. Again, assimilation applies here. So the initial “d” of the root word changes into “n”. Some examples:

4. There are certain nouns which come with “o” or “ɔ” as their prefixes, and suffixed by “ni”. Examples include osikani, opolisini, ɔkyerɛkyerɛni, etc. Quite often, such nouns form their plural nouns by substituting the “o”, “ɔ” prefixes for “a” or “n”, and changing the “ni” suffix into either “fo” or “foɔ”. Let’s look at some examples.

5. A certain group of nouns form their plurals simply by introducing either the prefix “n” or “m”. Examples:

6. Generally, we form the plurals of kinship terms by suffixing them with “nom”.

7. Some Akan nouns are the same in both the singular and plural forms. Some are:

Tɛkyerɛma apem (a thousand tongues)To show the plurality of nouns such as the above, we usually introduce certain quantifiers of some sort. For instance, we may say:

• nkrane du (ten ants)
• sika bɔtɔ ma (a sack-full of money)

8. For expressions such as the ones below which contain more than one word, we pluralize each word by applying the appropriate plural formation mechanism aforementioned.

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