Conclusion: Major issues in current GhE research
Descriptive accounts of GhE are comparatively few and not always easily available outside Ghana. Since the first studies from around 1950, Ghanaian scholarship has often taken a more practical, pedagogical approach to GhE, discussing its quality and intelligibility to Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians alike and proposing ways in which language teaching can be improved. A good number of these studies show a decidedly prescriptive attitude and deplore deteriorating standards of English in Ghana, echoing public opinion that things “used to be much better” a couple of decades ago. However, to put such claims into perspective it should be noted that concerns about falling standards are not a recent phenomenon – they go way back to the colonial period, as the title of Brown and Scragg’s 1948 Common Errors in Gold Coast English shows, and probably have always been around. Adherents of this prescriptive-pedagogical camp feel that Ghana as a developing country has more immediate needs than identifying and promoting a local standard of English, as is made poignantly clear by Gyasi (1990: 26):
What we need in Ghana to rescue English from atrophy and death is not algebra masquerading as grammar, or the linguistic anarchism preaching the ‘nasty little orthodoxy’ (…) that any variety of English is as good as the other. We need the scholarly but humane and relevant approaches of those distinguished standard-bearers of Standard English, Professor Sir Randolph Quirk and his colleagues, Professors Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik.
Whether or not the existence of a distinct GhE is acknowledged very much depends on one’s theoretical standpoint in this debate. The prescriptivists deny the reality of GhE as an autonomous variety and maintain that it essentially is (or ought to be) BrE. Anything else is simply labelled wrong English. In his seminal Ghanaian English Sey lists phonological, grammatical, and lexical “deviances” of GhE but says that “the educated Ghanaian would not ‘accept’ anything other than educated British Standard English” (1973: 7). This is also confirmed by the results of a language-attitude study of 30 educated Ghanaians (Dako 1991), which shows that to this group (a) GhE is an accent but has also some distinct lexical features; (b) British Standard English is considered the target language and therefore the norm in Ghana; (c) anything short of this target is felt to be substandard; but crucially also (d) that RP or any other native accent is not the target in spoken English. That is, it is in pronunciation more than any other area that speakers express their Ghanaianness, and an accent that sounds too British is usually frowned upon or even ridiculed. There is thus a double target of GhE: except maybe for the use of some lexical Ghanaianisms, standard written GhE in newspapers, magazines, etc. approximates to an exocentric norm, standard British written English. This is the professed (though not always attained) target in the educational sector and the variety modelled on it is spoken in formal settings by a small number of highly educated Ghanaians and is here tentatively called Cultivated GhE. The target of pronunciation, by contrast, is certainly endocentric, even for most speakers of Cultivated GhE. Many anglophone Ghanaians, however, speak a variety that is further removed from British standard grammar than Cultivated GhE and which could be called Conversational GhE, to emphasize its more informal character.
What is urgently needed are (preferably corpus-based, quantitative) descriptive studies of Conversational GhE and of informal and formal writing. These should be complemented by a study of the cline between broken and native-like varieties of GhE, as well as the various and complex interfaces between indigenous languages, Ghanaian Pidgin English and GhE.
Though a number of investigations have been based on privately compiled corpora, no text collections documenting GhE are currently publicly available. Ghana is listed as one of the West Africa components of the International Corpus of English, but compilation and computerization of the texts has not neared completion at the time of writing.
