Suprasegmentals

Like other West African Englishes, GhE is syllable-timed, resulting in the characteristic up and down of sentence intonation. A corollary of syllable-timing is that, unlike BrE, GhE does not show vowel reduction in unaccented syllables. Thus, unaccented vowels generally retain their full quality and schwa is hardly ever heard.

The majority of Ghanaians speak a tone language as their L1. In contrast to accent languages like English, these languages show prominence of an individual syllable by realizing it at a higher pitch than neighboring, non-prominent, syllables. They are also characterized by downdrift, a general lowering of absolute pitch as the utterance proceeds. At the end of a sentence, the tonal register is usually reset (upstepped) and the downdrift starts again. There is a tendency, especially with less educated speakers, to carry these features over to GhE.

Accent (or tone) shift can be observed in a number of polysyllabic words. Many Ghanaians move the main word stress forward in words like facili^Itate, investi^Igate, ca^Itegory, or te^Ilecommunication. Backward shift can also be observed, as in Eu^Iropeans, a^Issociation, and ^Iexchange.

Vowel lengthening for emphasis is much more common than in BrE and seems to mirror usage in Ghanaian languages, as in the ubiquitous at aaaaall ‘not at all’. Another common paralinguistic expression of emphasis is the use of creaky voice, often accompanied by voicing of voiceless consonants, cf. speaker B’s .

In that-subordination, informal GhE often places a noticeable pause after, not before, the conjunction: I saw that || they had stolen it. This is possibly a carry-over from Akan, whose complementizer sε derives from the verb se ‘say’ and has retained some of the verb’s quotative characteristics (cf. I said || “They had stolen it”).