La grafia unificata dei dialetti akan (Akan Unified Orthography): costi e benefici dell’armonizzazione ortografica

The present paper examines the advantages and discusses some of the drawbacks of the Akan Unified Orthography, the standardised orthography of the Akan dialects devised by the Akan Orthography Committee in the 1970s and adopted by the Bureau of Ghana Languages since 1978. A synthetic description of the various graphemes and of the digraphs selected in order to express the sounds of the Akan vowel and consonant systems is provided so as to put the reader in a position to appreciate some of the difficulties actually faced by the Orthography Committee. It will be argued that the Unified Orthography is indeed flexible enough to accommodate to the various dialect distinctions and represents an acceptable solution to the problem of language-internal dialect variation. However, it will be objected that the latter benefit is at least partially outweighed by lack of indications concerning tonal patterns as well as the effects of vowel harmony rules, which may be an advantage for writing, but turns out to be a serious obstacle as far as reading and ease of interpretation are taken into account.