Grace Diabah: “Emerging Trends in Akan Naming Practices: Reclaiming Indigenous Identity or Redefining Tradition?”

ABSTRACT:

This talk examines how contemporary personal naming practices among educated Akan families in Ghana serve as dynamic and complex sites for negotiating identity, tradition and modernity. While earlier practices privileged Western/foreign first names (associated with prestige, sophistication, and cosmopolitan identity), the past two decades have witnessed an increasing preference for exclusive Akan names. Based on responses from seventy-six semi-structured interviews, the study reveals a neonymic trend in which most of the names are created and used in innovative and unconventional ways. This trend, which is underexplored in existing scholarship, reflects a nuanced interrelationship between culture, religion and modernity. Importantly, these emerging practices are both affirming and transformative: they reinforce ethnolinguistic identity and religious beliefs but also challenge some established naming norms, including the tradition of naming a child after someone and gendered naming rights and power.