Upstream, Inland: Other People’s Languages

Abstract Although both widespread polyglotism and societal multilingualism may have been encouraged by the massive assimilation of people who spoke languages other than Ga, they are obviously not a simple result of it. Linguistic assimilation of a population can lead to the elimination of its language as a second language as well as to its maintenance. Many individual descendants of assimilated populations have indeed lost all command of their ancestral community language, and only one of the various languages mentioned in the last chapter, Akan, has in fact taken hold as a second language in Accra. Moreover, Hausa, perhaps the only true lingua franca other than English, did not appear at all. In this chapter, we consider the history of Akan and Hausa as second languages in the Volta basin and why they and not other languages dominate Accra and its hinterland.