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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, 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.
The Languages in the Southern Group (Côte d'Ivoire)

★ Dan (Yacouba)

★ Gban (Gagou)

★ Gouro

★ Mwan (Mona)

★ Ngain (Nagin Gben)

★ Toura

★ Wan (Ouan)

★ Yaouré

Contents

See also

References

External links

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.

★ Nazam HALAOUI, Kalilou TERA, Monique TRABI (1983) ''Atlas des langues mandé-sud de Côte d'Ivoire''. Abidjan : ACCT-ILA.

★ 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.

External links

★ http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=89972

★ [1]&[2]&[3]& ]&[4]&[5] texts on old writings in Mande languages and its relationship with soem other languages by Clyde A. Winters