Learn Twi Through Topics You Actually Care About

LingoBear creates short Twi passages on topics you choose. Tap any word for an instant English translation and build your vocabulary as you read. Niger-Congo (Kwa) language, principal literary form of Akan in Ghana, Latin script with Ɛɛ and Ɔɔ, two tones, lingua franca for ~18M Ghanaians.

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Every word in your Twi reading passage is clickable. Get English translations and grammar help — useful for parsing tone and vowel harmony.

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Type any topic and LingoBear generates a fresh Twi reading passage — from Adinkra symbolism to Kumasi market life.

What is Twi and how is it related to Akan?

Twi is the most widely spoken literary form of Akan, a Kwa language of Ghana. It is usually divided into Asante Twi (the largest variety, spoken in the historical Ashanti region) and Akuapem Twi (the prestige written form used in much of Ghana's early Akan publishing). Together with Fante, Twi covers around 18 million speakers in Ghana and the diaspora.

What grammar features does Twi have?

Twi uses SVO word order and is mildly agglutinative with subject prefixes on verbs. It has two contrastive tones (high and low) with downstep, and ATR (advanced tongue root) vowel harmony — vowels in a word group together by +ATR or -ATR, written using the special letters Ɛ and Ɔ for the -ATR mid vowels. Pronouns distinguish inclusive 'we' (yɛn) from emphatic forms.