Polite request among the Akyem speech community in Ghana

Abstract

This paper investigates into various ways by which native speakers of the Akyem Twi dialect of the Akan Language of Ghana make polite request and how social variables such as age, gender and socio-economic status influence their request making. An ethnographic research approach to qualitative design was employed and the research participants of twenty were randomly selected using the purposive sampling technique of which their responses from the interview and the observation to the topic problem were submitted to content analysis. The findings indicate that the strategy for polite request is the indirect strategy. Comparatively, the Akyem speech community equally prefers the conventional indirect strategy as the most polite strategy of request speech act as the other speech communities in Ghana. Also, social variables such as age, gender and socio-economic status influence request making yet equal status contradicts some findings in relation to familiarity. Again, Ghanaians have one condition that warrants request which is not part of the existing one; they believe that the individual granting the request should be trustworthy. Moreover, there were new interesting findings in this study.It was foundout that non-conventional indirect strategy has some natural features which make it different from the conventional strategy and more like the direct strategy, even though they are all indirect strategies