Critics Of “Fokn” In Bisa Kdei’s “Brother Brother” Song Schooled

This is what I usually term as “To Whom It May Concern”.

Who are those saying by the use of the word ‘f**king’ in Bisa K Dei’s ‘Brother Brother,’ it makes it profane and obscene?

Alright! Let’s learn something here. In language, we have ‘loan words.’ Read what Wikipedia says about loan words:

“A loanword (or loan word or loan-word) is a word adopted from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language without translation. It is distinguished from a calque, or loan translation, where a meaning or idiom from another language is translated into existing words or roots of the host language.

Examples of loanwords in English include café (from French café ‘coffee’), bazaar (from Persian bāzār ‘market’), and kindergarten (from German Kindergarten ‘children’s garden’).”

You didn’t understand that? Ok lemme help you. A loan word is a word borrowed from a language into another. It may not necessarily have the same meaning as in the original language.

The ‘f**king’ Bisa K Dei used in ‘Brother Brother’ is a typical example. I have seen and heard people ignorantly make their opinions heard on this matter.

My Ghana people, take note that the ‘f**king’ Bisa used is not the present continuous tense of the vulgar slang ‘f**k,’ neither is it an adjective of the word. It is an ADVERB!

The adverb ‘fu*king,’ borrowed into the Twi, can be transliterated as ‘forkin.’ [Please research on ‘transliteration’]. That is why Bisa would choose to write it like ‘forkin.’ Transliteration is allowed especially when most of our typing machines don’t have the characters of the Twi alphabet. If it should be represented in real Twi characters, it would be ‘fɔken.’

Now let’s get into the meaning of ‘f**king’ [and in Bisa’s instance ‘forkin’] in ‘Brother Brother.’ That word has a totally different meaning from the original meaning which oxford online dictionary defines as “used for emphasis or to express anger, annoyance, contempt, or surprise.”

This adverb in Twi is used to represent something in its extreme or the intensity of something. It is not negative. It is not an expletive. It is not vulgar. In Twi, this loan word is not a swear word.

Has anybody bothered to find the meaning of the word ‘brutal’? Do you know it is used in the Twi language too, also to express the intensity of an act or emotion? We say, “m’ani agye brutal.” But do we care to find the real meaning of ‘brutal’ in the English language?

Brutal means ‘savagely violent,’ ‘unpleasant or harsh’ and it is even an adjective. In English it does not even have an adverb form. But we borrow into Twi, turn it into an adverb, give it our own meaning, and make it our own word.

This is language. Let’s learn and stop displaying our ignorance on issues we have no idea about. If you don’t know, shut up and learn!

By Kwame Dadzie