ABSTRACT
The KWA languages are spoken in the eastern part of the Ivory Coast, the southern part of the Gold Coast, Togoland, and Dahomey, and the south-western part of Nigeria. The term KWA languages was first used by G. A. Krause in 1885, and propagated by Christaller. It is derived from the word for 'people' in many of these languages, which contains the root kwa. Most of these languages are known from vocabularies only; it is thus not possible to make any definitive classification of them. It appears, however, that they are sufficiently closely interrelated to be provisionally grouped together. The name AKAN was originally a collective name used to cover the inhabitants of the Akwapem, Akem, Asante, Akwamu, and some other territories, but is now used by Europeans to denote the whole group of people speaking languages of this Group.
