The Twi alphabet

Akan Twi is written with 22 letters: a b d e ɛ f g h i k l m n o ɔ p r s t u w y. Fifteen are consonants and seven are vowels. Two of the vowels, ɛ and ɔ, are not in the English alphabet, and the English letters c, j, q, v, x and z are not used. The examples below show each letter in a common word.

The seven vowel letters are a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u. Ɛ is the open 'e' of 'set', and ɔ is the open 'o' of 'all'. Three letters stand for two sounds each: a can sound as in 'bath' or as in 'man', e as in 'hate' or as in 'dip', and o as in 'old' or as in 'foot'. That gives about ten vowel sounds from seven letters.

Many Twi sounds are written with two letters. Gy sounds like the 'j' in 'jug', hy like 'sh' in 'shirt', ky like 'ch' in 'church', and ny like the 'ny' in 'canyon'. Kw is the 'qu' of 'quick'. Dw, tw, hw and nw have no English match: they are roughly j, ch, h and ny sounds said with rounded lips.

Twi is a tone language with two basic tones, high and low, and tone can change a word's meaning or its tense. Standard spelling does not mark tone, so learners rely on listening. Some phrases are also written more fully than they are said: Meda wo ase (thank you) is pronounced medaase, and Mepa wo kyɛw (please) is pronounced mepaakyɛw.

Use the real letters ɛ (U+025B) and ɔ (U+0254), with capitals Ɛ (U+0190) and Ɔ (U+0186). Older documents sometimes use look-alikes such as the Greek ε or the symbol ⊃; those break search, spell-checking and text-to-speech, so replace them. A keyboard that supports Twi, such as the free bhala.app keyboard, gives you ɛ and ɔ directly; on a computer, add an Akan or Twi keyboard layout in your language settings or insert the letters by code point.