Akan day names: Twi, Fante and Nzema, and what each one means

Every Akan child - Asante, Fante, Akuapem, Akyem, Bono, Kwahu, Nzema and the rest - has a day name before it has any other. The Akan call it kradin, the soul’s name, because the soul is believed to choose the day the child arrives, and the day is believed to shape the person.

Everything here is from Kofi Agyekum’s study of Akan personal names, in the Nordic Journal of African Studies (2006), unless it says otherwise.

The days of the week

The Akan names of the days are a deity’s name with -da, “day”, on the end - the same pattern as English Sun-day and Mon-day, and older than the arrival of Europeans. When the Portuguese reached Elmina in the fifteenth century, the chief who met them was Nana Kwamena Ansa: already a day name.

Twi and Fante

The two big Akan dialects share some names and differ on others, and Fante often has two forms of its own:

So Ekow and Yaw are the same day, as are Ebo and Kwabena, and Fiifi is a Friday boy from the coast. Spellings vary further still - Akwasi, Kwadjo, Kwabina, Yao, Afia, Amma - and all are in use.

Each day’s praise name and character

Among Twi speakers each day name has an appellation, a praise name that hints at the character of people born that day, and elders greet a person with it. The reply is a third word, the same for men and women, because all three come from the day’s deity.

So a Monday-born is meant to be calm and peaceable, a Friday-born restless and adventurous, a Saturday-born creative. It is tradition, not a verdict on anyone.

Names tied to sacred days

The Akan calendar has sacred days that come round every forty days - Fofie on a Friday, Adae on a Sunday, Dapaa on a Tuesday or Saturday - when nobody goes to the farm. A child born on one can carry the day’s name beside its day name: Kofi Fofie, Afua Fofie, Kwasi Adae, Ama Dapaa, Kwabena Dapaa.

When a day name is changed

The day name is almost never changed, with one exception. A child named after a relative may take the relative’s day name instead of its own, so the name is not mistaken for the father’s. Agyekum gives his own case: his son was born on a Friday, but he named him after his father, Kwasi Agyekum - and calling the boy Kofi Agyekum would have read as naming him after himself. So the boy became Kwasi.

It is why a Ghanaian’s day name does not always match the day they were born.

Nzema: the days move, the names do not

Nzema speakers, in the far west of Ghana, give children the Akan names for the Akan days, but the Nzema words for the days themselves are one day out of step. The Nzema word for Friday, Yaale, is the one that matches Yaw - yet a child born on Thursday is still Yaw or Yaba, as in Twi. So for Nzema speakers the name of the day and the name of the child born on it do not match.

Across the border in Côte d’Ivoire the Anyi and Baule go further: their children’s names move with their days, so a Baule child born on a Monday is Kwasi. All of this is from Florence Abena Dolphyne’s study of the Akan languages (1986), which puts the Nzema children’s names down to living beside Twi and Fante speakers, whose language is that of trade, school and church in much of the area.

The names Nzema children get, in Dolphyne’s list:

The Tuesday girl’s name is not legible in the scanned original, so it is left out rather than guessed.

Beyond the day name

A day name is only the first of an Akan person’s names. The family adds another at the outdooring, and there are names for the order of birth, for twins, for where and when a child was born and for what the family was going through.

— What Akan names mean — Twins, and the children after them — All Ghanaian day names — Learning Twi and Ga