Gold Coast alphabet

The Gold Coast alphabet was a Latin alphabet used to write the Akan language during the Gold Coast era, now Ghana. It differed from the current Akan alphabet in several ways, most fundamentally in vowel notation.

Vowels

Akan has nine vowels, four pairs that differ whether they have an advanced tongue root, and, which is -neutral. In the Gold Coast script, the non- vowels were written with the five vowels of the Latin script, a e i o u, and the vowels by adding a subscript dot to these. In modern Akan, seven vowel letters are used, with two of them being ambiguous. In addition, the Gold Coast script used a tilde to mark nasal vowels, which are not marked in modern Akan.

Phoneme	Sound	Gold Coast	Modern Akan
i̘	i̘	ị	i
i	ɪ	i	e
e̘	e̘	ẹ	e
e	ɛ	e	ɛ
a	a	a	a
	ɐ *	a	a
o	ɔ	o	ɔ
o̘	o̘	ọ	o
u	ʊ	u	o
u̘	u̘	ụ	u

* The allophone of produced by vowel harmony with vowels is not itself in Asante dialect, but nonetheless is markedly distinct from the allophone. It is not distinguished from in either orthography. In the Fante dialect, it has merged with.