Mande languages

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 Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. This linguistic group is traditionally considered 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

Mande does not share the morphology characteristic of most of the Niger-Congo family, such as the noun-class system. Blench regards it as an early branch that—like Ijoid and perhaps Dogon—diverged before this developed. However, Dimmendaal (2008) argues that the evidence for inclusion is slim, with no new evidence for decades, and that for now Mande is best considered an independent family.^[1]

Most internal 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].

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)

See also

• Manding languages
• Mandé
• Mende language

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.
• Kastenholz, Raimund (1996) Sprachgeschichte im West-Mande: Methoden und Rekonstruktionen. Mande Languages and Linguistics · Langues et Linguistique Mandé, 2. Köln : Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. 281 p.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

External links

• http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=89972
• http://mandelang.kunstkamera.ru/index/langues_mande/

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