Mende language

Not to be confused with Mende language (Papua New Guinea).

Mende
Mɛnde yia 𞠗𞢱 𞡓𞠣
Native to	Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea
Region	South central Sierra Leone
Ethnicity	Mende people
Native speakers	2.5 million (2020–2021)
Language family	Niger–Congo? Mande Western Southwestern Mende–Loma Mende–Bandi Mende–Loko Mende
Dialects	Ko Kpa Sewawa Wanjama
Writing system	Latin Mende Kikakui script
Language codes
ISO 639-2	men
ISO 639-3	men
Glottolog	mend1266
ELP

Mende /ˈmɛndi/ (Mɛnde yia) is a major language of Sierra Leone, with some speakers in neighboring Liberia and Guinea. It is spoken by the Mende people and by other ethnic groups as a regional lingua franca in southern Sierra Leone.

Mende is a tonal language belonging to the Mande language family. Early systematic descriptions of Mende were by F. W. Migeod and Kenneth Crosby. Ethel Aginsky decoded the language in her doctoral work.

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labiovelar	Glottal
Plosive	plain	p	t		k	k͡p
	voiced	b	d		ɡ	ɡ͡b
	prenasalized	m͡b	n͡d		ŋ͡ɡ	ŋɡ͡b
Fricative	plain	f	s				h
	voiced	v
Affricate	voiced			d͡ʒ
	prenasalized			ɲd͡ʒ
Lateral			l
Nasal		m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Approximant		w		j

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Close-mid	e		o
Open-mid	ɛ		ɔ
Open		a

Written forms

In 1921, Kisimi Kamara invented a syllabary for Mende he called Kikakui (𞠀𞠁𞠂‎ / ). The script achieved widespread use for a time, but has largely been replaced with an alphabet based on the Latin script, and the Mende script is considered a "failed script". The Bible was translated into Mende and published in 1959, in Latin script.

The Latin-based alphabet is: a, b, d, e, ɛ, f, g, gb, h, i, j, k, kp, l, m, n, ny, o, ɔ, p, s, t, u, v, w, y.

Mende has seven vowels: a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u.

Media

Film

Mende was used extensively in the films Amistad and Blood Diamond and was the subject of the documentary film The Language You Cry In about the connections between the Gullah people of present-day Georgia and their ancestors from Sierra Leone, beginning with the work of Lorenzo Dow Turner who documented Gullah memories of the Mende language.

Oral literature

In 1908, F.W.H. Migeod, a British civil servant, published The Mende Language, which contains 17 stories in Mende with facing-text English translations, along with 13 Mende songs (lyrics only, no music).

Ralph Eberl-Elber, an Austrian ethnologist, published two Mende tales with English translations as he heard them in Sierra Leone in the 1935.

The American anthropologist Marion Dusser de Barenne Kilson worked with Mende storytellers in Sierra Leone as a graduate student in 1959 and 1960 (her husband, the political scientist Martin Kilson, was also conducting research in Sierra Leone at the time). Marion Kilson then returned to Sierra Leone in 1972 for further research and in 1976 she published Royal Antelope and Spider: West African Mende Tales, which contains 100 Mende folktales in both the original Mende and in English translation. The introduction provides an overview of Mende culture along with detailed information about Mende storytelling traditions.

For Mende proverbs in Mende and English translation, see "Some Mεnde Proverbs," an article published by M. Mary Senior in 1947.

Sample text

Numuvuisia Kpɛlɛɛ ta ti le tɛ yɛ nduwɔ ya hu, tao ti nuvuu yei kɛɛ ti lɔnyi maa hɛwungɔ. Kiiya kɛɛ hindaluahu gɔɔla a yɛlɔ ti hun. Fale mahoungɔ ti ti nyɔnyɔhu hoi kia ndeegaa.

Translation

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

External links

• Bibliography on Mende
• The Mende syllabary (Omniglot)
• PanAfrican L10n page on Mende, Bandi & Loko
• Portions of the Book of Common Prayer in Mende (1916)
• OLAC resources in and about the Mende language