Kradin
What’s your Kradin? The soul name of any date, the adaduanan calendar and the Kɔradin script.
Find a day
Kradin, the soul name
Kra is the soul, din the name. Every Akan person carries the name of the weekday they were born on, and with it the ɔkra of that day: one of the seven souls of the Creator. Kwasi and Akosua belong to Ayisi on Sunday, Kwadwo and Adwoa to Adwo on Monday, and so on through the week.
A kradin is more than a label. It carries a character, praise names and observances, and places each person inside the 42-day adaduanan that ordered Akan life.
Kɔradin, the script
Kɔradin is a syllabary for the Akan languages. Each sign writes a syllable, built from a radical and its modifiers, so a name is written as it is spoken.
Every name on this page is shown in Kɔradin above its Latin form. Hover or tap any Kɔradin to read it.
dapaa · good daydabɔne · sacred, restricteddahunu · ordinaryHover or tap a day for its name.
Sacred days this year
The 42 days
Each day of the adaduanan joins a prefix of the nnanson and a stem of the nnawɔtwe. Category and interpretation after Kwasi Konadu.
Source: Kwasi Konadu, “The Calendrical Factor in Akan History”, International Journal of African Historical Studies 45:2 (2012), pp. 217–246, Table 4.
Kɔradin is a writing system for Akan words, shown here in the Koradin typeface. The table lists its syllables: the onset down the side, the vowel across the top.
Day names
Every Akan child receives a kra din, a soul name tied to the day of birth. Point atTap a name to light its syllables in the table. A row opens to show other spellings.
Surnames
Akan surnames in Kɔradin. Point atTap a name to light its syllables in the table.
| Name | Kɔradin |
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About Kɔradin
Kɔradin was created in 2021. It draws on Afaka, Adinkra, Ewe symbols and Ga symbols, and turns that inheritance into a script for Akan words.
Ideographic symbols are not unique to one people. The Akan, like closely related groups such as the Ga and the Ewe, have long used signs that carry an idea, a proverb or a value rather than a sound. Adinkra is the best known example. Kɔradin takes that visual habit and gives it a phonetic job: each sign stands for a syllable.
Breakdown
Related sounds share a base row. The variants below it are modified forms of that base.
Ambition
Kɔradin is written for the whole Akan family: Asante and Akuapem Twi, Fante, Baoulé, Agni, Ahanta, Nzema. Asante Twi is its working standard today: the tables, fonts and lessons start from it, and each variety will be added in turn.
Wherever Latin letters gave one name many spellings (Kwasi, Quassi, Kouassi, Kwesi), Kɔradin gives it back one, based on sound. It is one of the first creations of Merankron.
- Everyday use. A font, a keyboard and a browser extension that shows any Akan text in Kɔradin.
- Learning. Sua, short lessons to read Kɔradin and learn Akan.
- Recognition. Documentation of the script towards Unicode encoding.
- Design. A visual language for Neo-Akan art, fashion, architecture and media.
How it works
Akan is built from consonant and vowel pairs. Each pair is one sign: ka, kɔ, kye, twe.
Related sounds share a base sign. Variants are modified forms of it: ky and tw grow from t, dw and gy from d, b and kp from p.
a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u. The open vowels ɛ and ɔ have their own forms.
m, n and ng become marks: under the sign they close, or before the sign they open.
Consonant clusters take their vowel back: Brafo is written barafo, Frimpong firimpong.
Names are spelled as said: Mensah is mɛnsa.