I own this language that everybody speaks

Abstract

Based on interviews conducted in ten Catholic churches of the Ghanaian capital, Accra, the paper offers a profile of English use in Ghana and reports on the attitudes of Ghanaians toward English as the official language of their country. The results reveal the influential role English plays in the different settings of Ghanaian communication as well as the high esteem afforded to the English language by the majority of Ghanaian respondents. Most of them cited the numerous benefits that English, as a language of wider communication, brings to the individual speaker and the country.