Mande Languages

Mande languages are spoken across much of inland West Africa up to the northwest of Nigeria as their eastern limit. The center of gravity of the Mande-speaking world is situated in the southwest of Mali and the neighboring regions. There are approximately seventy Mande languages. Mande languages have long been recognized as a coherent group. Thanks to both a sufficient number of clear lexical correspondences and the remarkable uniformity in basic morphosyntax, the attribution of a given language to Mande is usually straightforward. The major subdivision within Mande is between Western Mande, which comprises the majority of both languages and speakers, and Southeastern Mande (aka Southern Mande or Eastern Mande, which are also the names for the two subbranches of Southeastern Mande), a comparatively small but linguistically diverse and geographically dispersed group. Traditionally, Mande languages have been classified as one of the earliest offshoots of Niger-Congo. However, their external affiliation still remains a working hypothesis rather than an established fact. One of the most well-known Mande languages is probably Bamana (aka Bambara), as well as some of its close relatives, which in nonlinguistic publications are sometimes indiscriminately referred to as Mandingo. Mande languages are written in a variety of scripts ranging from Latin-based or Arabic-based alphabets to indigenously developed scripts, both syllabic and alphabetic.