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Mande languages: Information from Answers.com

Branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Mande comprises 40 languages of West Africa with more than 20 million speakers in a more or less contiguous area of southeastern Senegal, The Gambia, southern Mauritania, southwestern Mali, eastern Guinea, northern and eastern Sierra Leone, northern Liberia, and western Côte d'Ivoire. Substantial numbers are also found in Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Burkina Faso; and there are very much smaller, isolated pockets in the region. The most significant subgroup is the Mandekan complex — a continuum of languages and dialects, including those spoken by the Bambara, Malinke, Maninka, and Dyula — spoken from Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea east through Mali to Burkina Faso. Mande, spoken in Sierra Leone, also has more than a million speakers. Several independent writing systems based on the syllable were developed by speakers of Mande languages. The best-known is the Vai script, but Mende, Loma, and Kpelle also have their own scripts.

For more information on Mande languages, visit Britannica.com.

Mande West Sudanic
Geographic distribution:	West Africa
Genetic classification:	Niger-Congo Mande
Subdivisions:	Manding-Kpelle (Central & Southwest) Samogo-Soninke (Northwest) Dan-Busa (East)

Mande

West Sudanic

Geographic
distribution:

West Africa

Genetic
classification:

Niger-Congo
Mande

Subdivisions:

Manding-Kpelle (Central & Southwest)

Samogo-Soninke (Northwest)

Dan-Busa (East)

The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé people and include Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Bissa, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mende, Susu, Yacouba, Vai, and Ligbi. The population includes millions of speakers, chiefly in The Gambia, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Senegal. This linguistic group is a divergent branch of the Niger-Congo family.

The group was first recognized in 1854 by S. W. Koelle in his Polyglotta Africana. He mentioned 13 languages under the heading North-Western High-Sudan Family, or Mandéga Family of Languages. In 1901 Maurice Delafosse made a distinction of two groups in his Essai de manuel pratique de la langue mandé ou mandingue. He speaks of a northern group mandé-tan and a southern group mandé-fu. This distinction was basically done only because the languages in the north use the expression tan for ten whereas the southern group use fu. In 1924 L. Tauxier noted that this distinction is not well founded and there is at least a third subgroup he called mandé-bu. It is not until 1950 when A. Prost supports this view and gives further details. In 1958 Welmers published an article The Mande Languages where he divided the languages into three subgroups - North-West, South and East. His conclusion was based on lexicostatistic research. Greenberg followed this distinction in his The Languages of Africa (1963). Long (1971) and G. Galtier (1980) follow the distinction into three groups but with notable differences.

The N'Ko alphabet is a script for Mande languages developed by Souleymane Kante, which is mostly used in Guinea.

Classification

Most Mande classifications are based on lexicostatistics, and the results are unreliable. The following classification from Kastenholz (1996) is based on lexical innovations and comparative linguistics; details of East Mande are from Dwyer (1989, 1996) [summarized in Williamson & Blench 2000].

Mande

East Mande
(Dan–Busa)

Southeast
Mande

Bisa–Busa

Samo–Busa

	Samo languages

Busa languages

Bissa

West Mande

Central–West
(Manding–Kpelle)

Central Mande

Southwest Mande

Northwest
(Samogo–Soninke)

Northwest proper

Soninke–Bobo

	Samogo languages

Jɔ

Characteristics

Mande languages generally do not have the noun-class system or verbal extensions of the Atlantic-Congo languages and for which the Bantu languages are so famous, though Bɔbɔ has causative and intransitive forms of the verb. They do however have initial consonant mutation on nouns. Plurality is often marked with tone, as for example in Sembla. Pronouns commonly have alienable–inalienable and inclusive–exclusive distinctions. Word order in transitive clauses is subject–auxiliary–object–verb–adverb. Both prepositions and postpositions are used. Within noun phrases, possessives generally come before the noun, adjectives and plural markers after, while demonstratives are found with both orders. (Williamson & Blench 2000)

References

Delafosse, Maurice (1901) Essai de manuel pratique de la langue mandé ou mandingue. Paris : Leroux. 304 p.
Delafosse, Maurice (1904) Vocabulaires comparatifs de plus de soixante langues ou dialectes parlés à la Côte d'Ivoire et dans les régions limitrophes, avec des notes linguistiques et ethnologiques. Paris : Leroux. 285 p.
Halaoui, Nazam, Kalilou Tera, Monique Trabi (1983) Atlas des langues mandé-sud de Côte d'Ivoire. Abidjan : ACCT-ILA.
Vydrine, Valentin, T.G. Bergman and Matthew Benjamin (2000) Mandé language family of West Africa: Location and genetic classification. SIL Electronic Survey Report. Dallas, SIL International.
Sullivan, Terrence D. 2004 [1983]. A preliminary report of existing information on the Manding languages of West Africa: Summary and suggestions for future research. SIL Electronic Survey Report. Dallas, SIL International.
Welmers, William E.(1971) Niger-Congo, Mande. In Linguistics in Sub-Saharan Africa (Current Trends in Linguistics,7), Thomas A. Sebeok, Jade Berry, Joseph H. Greenberg et al. (eds.), 113–140. The Hague: Mouton.
Williamson, Kay, and Roger Blench (2000) "Niger-Congo". In Heine & Nurse, eds., African Languages.