The Gold Coast alphabet was a Latin alphabet used to write the Akan language

Akan language

Akan, also known as Twi and Fante, is an Akan language that is the principal native language of Ghana, spoken over much of the southern half of that country, by about 52% of the population, and to a lesser extent across the border in eastern Côte d'Ivoire...

 during British colonial rule of the Gold Coast

Gold Coast (British colony)

The Gold Coast was a British colony on the Gulf of Guinea in west Africa that became the independent nation of Ghana in 1957.-Overview:The first Europeans to arrive at the coast were the Portuguese in 1471. They encountered a variety of African kingdoms, some of which controlled substantial...

, now Ghana

Ghana

Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...

. It differed from the current Akan alphabet in several ways, of which the most fundamental was in vowel notation.

Vowels

Akan has nine vowels, four pairs that differ whether they have an advanced tongue root

Advanced tongue root

In phonetics, advanced tongue root and retracted tongue root, abbreviated ATR or RTR, are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in West Africa, but also in Kazakh and Mongolian...

 , and /a/, which is -neutral. In the Gold Coast script, the non- vowels were written with the five vowels of the Latin script, a e i o u, and the vowels by adding a subscript dot to these. (The vowels have a hollow sound to them, whereas the non- vowels sound rather like the lax vowels of English.) In modern Akan, seven vowel letters are used, with two of them being ambiguous. In addition, the Gold Coast script used a tilde

Tilde

The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics....

 to mark nasal vowel

Nasal vowel

A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. By contrast, oral vowels are ordinary vowels without this nasalisation...

s, which are not marked in modern Akan.

Phoneme	Sound	Gold Coast	Modern Akan
i̘	i̘	ị	i
i	ɪ	i	e
e̘	e̘	ẹ
e	ɛ	e	ɛ
a	a	a	a
[a̘]	ɐ *
o	ɔ	o	ɔ
o̘	o̘	ọ	o
u	ʊ	u
u̘	u̘	ụ	u

* The allophone

Allophone

In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

 of /a/ produced by vowel harmony

Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....

 with vowels is not itself in Asante dialect, but nontheless is markedly distinct from the [a] allophone. It is not distinguished from [a] in either orthography. In the Fante dialect, it has merged with [ɛ]. (See International Phonetic Alphabet

International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...

for an explanation of the symbols in the first two columns.)