Twi, or Akan, is a Niger-Congo language spoken by over 8.000.000 people in south-central Ghana. It is the most widely spoken indigenous language in Ghana. Twi is often said to be one of two main dialects of Akan (the other being Fante); as with many languages, the classification of dialect and language can be rather fluid. At the time this book was published, there were different orthographies (spelling) for the two main dialects of Akan. These were combined in 1978, so spelling in this book may not be what is used today.

The book presented here was first published in 1957; a revision came out in 1962, but, as near as we can determine, the only significant difference was to replace prayers for the Queen with prayers for the President. It was translated by ED Martinson, the Asst. Bishop of Accra at the time, and a native speaker of the language. As may be seen from the Table of Contents below, the book includes most of the services present in the 1662 BCP, with a few additions mostly reflecting the Anglo-Catholic orientation of the Ghanaian Church. It is listed in David Griffiths' Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer as 184:1; this book (and its revisions) is, to the best of our knowledge, the only BCP translation into Twi or any Akan dialect.

The text is presented here as PDF (Adobe Acrobat) graphics. This is mainly due to the presence of two unusual characters not part of the standard ASCII character set. These are the Greek lower case epsilon (which looks like a backwards 3), and the "open o", which looks like a backwards c. These represent the sounds short e and short o, respectively. The open o in particular is represented in very few fonts, making it difficult to render in HTML. The PDF files include bookmarks for easier navigation, and there is text "behind" the graphics; however, this text has not been proofread and one may assume that it contains errors.

Contents

Morning Prayer
Evening Prayer
Litany
Various Occasional Prayers
Collects, Epistles and Gospels for Sundays and Festivals
Asperges
Holy Communion—The Lord’s Supper
Prayers after Holy Communion
Benediction
Baptism of Infants
Baptism of such as are of riper years
The Order of Confirmation
Solemnization of Matrimony
Churching of Women
Burial of Adults
Burial of Infants
Absolution of the Dead
Some Psalms
Hymns (omitted)
Supplementary Hymns (omitted)

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the Book of Common Prayer in Twi (7MB)