Akan
Americannoun
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a language of the Kwa branch of Niger-Congo spoken in much of Ghana and parts of the Ivory Coast.
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a member of any of various Akan-speaking peoples, including the Ashanti and Fanti.
noun
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a member of a people of Ghana and the E Côte d'Ivoire
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the language of this people, having two chief dialects, Fanti and Twi, and belonging to the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo family
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Example Sentences
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The description says it is a metaphorical symbol used by the Akan people of Ghana to express “the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 6, 2026
A video shared by local media showed MPs in the dimly lit chamber chanting: "Dumsor, dumsor", which means power outage in the local Akan language.
From BBC ● Mar. 1, 2024
“The world has discovered that there’s a new way to approach music … that hits you, gives you a new emotion, gives you new feelings, gives you a new experience,” says Akan of Afrobeats Intelligence.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 2, 2024
In recent decades, their global population has been decreasing and now the only place where balls of 20 cm and larger exist is Lake Akan in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 16, 2023
The volume commences with an account of the Akan tribes and their existence in two main branches--Fanti and Ashanti.
From The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, January 1916 by Various
But some matrilocal communities exist today or in the recent past, including the Akans in Ghana, West Africa and Cherokee in North America.
From BBC ● Jan. 15, 2025
The Akans, among whom Busia is a royal prince, are four times as nu merous in Ghana as the Ewe tribe, to which his adversary Gbedemah belongs.
From Time Magazine Archive
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
