Code-Switching in Love: The Ghanaian Wife Who Translates Her Own Marriage

2 hours ago

5 min read

In an intercultural marriage in Accra, a single spouse often becomes the family's unpaid interpreter, and the strain comes less from difference than from who does the translating.

In 1953, Joe Appiah, a young lawyer from the Gold Coast, married Peggy Cripps, daughter of the former British Chancellor Sir Stafford Cripps, in a Church of England ceremony in London. Newspapers on several continents covered it, and South Africa's justice minister denounced it in public. The couple moved to the Gold Coast late in 1954.

History remembers the marriage for its courage, but the detail that matters here is the language. In Kumasi, Peggy learned Twi and spent decades gathering Asante folktales and proverbs. Her last major work, compiled with her son Kwame and Ivor Agyemang-Duah, holds about 7,000 of them. In that household, the foreign spouse carried a large share of the translating.

On a Sunday afternoon in October, 73 years after that wedding, Ohenewaa Frimpong sat between her husband and her mother's elder sister in her parents' sitting room in Nungua and translated in 2 directions at once. She was 36, an HR business partner at a cocoa trading company in Cantonments. Terrence Ward, 41, was a supply-chain consultant from Atlanta who had moved to Accra in 2021. They had been married 3 years and rented a detached house with a small veranda in Nmai Dzorn.

At 4:15 p.m., with a bottle of Malta sweating on the side table, the aunt asked in Twi when the family could expect a grandchild. Ohenewaa gave the answer every Ghanaian daughter keeps ready: it would come in God's time. Terrence caught the Twi word for child and asked what had been said. She told him in English. He smiled at the room and explained, in the easy voice of a man answering a friendly question, that they were not trying yet because they wanted to own a house before they had a child.

The aunt set her glass down. Ohenewaa turned back to Twi and told her that her husband meant they were preparing a proper home for the child, which was close enough to true. At 6:10 p.m., on the drive home, Terrence said she had a completely different voice in that house, and that he could not tell which one belonged to his wife.

A Ghanaian woman in her parents' sitting room in Nungua, Accra, turns to speak to her aunt while her Black American husband looks on

Linguists call what Ohenewaa did code-switching: moving between languages, sometimes inside a single sentence. In ordinary use it also means moving between selves, the office voice and the family voice, and most educated Ghanaians do it before lunch. An intercultural marriage adds a passenger who does not know the rules, and 1 spouse becomes the household's standing interpreter, editing what each side hears, with no title and no end date. Accra now draws returnees, foreign professionals and a diaspora taking Ghanaian citizenship, and with them, more homes that run on a translator nobody appointed.

Ghana was built for switching. The 2021 Population and Housing Census found that 69.8% of Ghanaians aged 6 and older can read and write, and among those literate in 2 languages, 95.6% pair English with a Ghanaian language, according to the Ghana Statistical Service. School and office run in English. The family house runs in Twi, Fante, Ga, Ewe, Dagbani or another Ghanaian language, and the move between them carries rules about who may ask what, and how an answer is wrapped.

Ohenewaa was not being evasive with her aunt, and Terrence was not being rude. Each was being respectful by the rules of a different house. In many Ghanaian families, a question about children is a form of care, asked in public because the family considers a marriage partly its business, and an elder is answered with deference and a little delay. In the Atlanta Terrence grew up in, a direct answer to a direct question is a courtesy, and a vague one reads as hiding something. Both codes exist to protect relationships. They simply protect different ones.

A Ghanaian HR professional presents to colleagues in a glass-walled meeting room in Cantonments, Accra

Ghana's open door to the diaspora makes the gap harder to see. In March 2026, 150 people of African descent, many of them Black Americans, were sworn in as Ghanaian citizens in Accra, adding to more than 1,000 who had taken the oath in recent years. Families greet these arrivals as returning kin. The warmth is sincere, and it carries an assumption that a Black American son-in-law already knows the rules. A family that would brief a British or Chinese in-law about elders, gifts and questions about children rarely briefs a man who looks like their own cousins. The Appiah marriage announced its difference at the church door. Marriages like Ohenewaa's carry a difference that nobody at the table can see.

South Africa recognised sign language as its 12th official language in July 2023, and in Johannesburg, where many of those languages share the same offices, marriages across language groups are ordinary.

The interpreter's role also carries power, the part couples rarely talk about. The person who translates decides what each side hears. Ohenewaa's edit in Nungua served her as well as her husband, because her own answer to her aunt's question was unsettled, and the family formula let her avoid giving it out. Across a decade and more than 2,500 counselling sessions, intercultural couples have tended to arrive describing the problem as the families. The longer conversation usually finds something narrower: a single partner has been editing for years, and the other has never heard the original. The foreign spouse feels managed. The interpreter feels unseen.

A Ghanaian wife and her Black American husband talk on the veranda of their house in Accra in the evening

The usual advice to anyone in Accra considering a foreign spouse is to marry within the culture, and it has a strong case. Shared rules save energy. A couple from the same background needs no briefing before the knocking ceremony and no translation of a proverb at a funeral, and families relax when they can read the newcomer.

That case assumes the strain comes from difference. The counselling room suggests it comes from direction. Plenty of Ghanaian marriages between 2 people from the same town contain a spouse who switches all day, at the office, at church and at the in-laws', beside a spouse who stopped switching years ago, and the one still switching is as tired as Ohenewaa. Code-switching is often described as a mask worn for other people. Inside a marriage it behaves like a skill, and a household runs into trouble when only 1 adult has it. In an intercultural marriage, how different the 2 people are matters less than who does the translating. The Appiah marriage carried more visible difference than almost any of its decade, and in Kumasi the language moved toward the family.

The following Sunday, Terrence asked Ohenewaa to teach him how to answer her aunt in Twi, in his own words, so that she would not have to stand in the middle. She agreed. Then, sitting on the veranda in Nmai Dzorn with a pen and the back of a supermarket receipt, she found she could not tell him what to say, because she had never decided what her own answer was. The aunt turns 70 in December. The family will gather in Nungua again, and this time 2 people at the table will be choosing their words in Twi. PG Sebastian

Married across cultures and tired of being the one who translates? Marriage Chat by Steps to Forever gives couples a private place to talk through families, language and expectations together, so neither partner has to carry every conversation alone.

Free to begin. app.stepstoforever.org