ISO 639

Dear Antoine,

You have just come across one of only two instances where Ethnologue does not follow the ISO 639-3 Standard.

Ethnologue editors decided, based on information from SIL personnel in Ghana, that Akan [aka] should be the language (not macrolanguage) and Fanta [fat] and Twi [twi], two of its dialects.

The reason: Most Ghanaian linguists would classify Twi [twi] and Fanti [fat] as dialects of Akan; they are mutually intelligible. As we understand it, "Akan" was a name created by Ghanaian academics and language activists in the mid-20th century when they sought to standardize the Fante-Asante-Akuampen written language varieties.

Best wishes,

Chuck Fennig
Managing Editor, Ethnologue

PS In case you are curious, the other language is Norwegian [nor], where Bokmål [nob] and Nynorsk [nno] have their own codes.