Dama Language (Sierra Leone)
Dama is an extinct language of Sierra Leone. It was replaced by Mende language, Mende. Based on a few remembered words and toponyms, Dalby (1963) believed it to be a Northern Mande language The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples and include Maninka, Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Kpelle, Dioula, Bozo, Mende, Susu, and Vai. There are "60 to 75 languages spoken by 30 to 40 millio ..., similar to Kono and Vai, but ''Glottolog'' leaves it unclassified. References Languages of Sierra Leone Unclassified languages of Africa Extinct languages of Africa Mande languages {{Mande-lang-stub ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone,)]. officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered by Liberia to the southeast and Guinea surrounds the northern half of the nation. Covering a total area of , Sierra Leone has a tropical climate, with diverse environments ranging from savanna to rainforests. The country has a population of 7,092,113 as of the 2015 census. The capital and largest city is Freetown. The country is divided into five administrative regions, which are subdivided into 16 districts. Sierra Leone is a constitutional republic with a unicameral parliament and a directly elected president serving a five-year term with a maximum of two terms. The current president is Julius Maada Bio. Sierra Leone is a secular nation with the constitution providing for the separation of state and religion and freedom of conscience (which includes freedom of thoughts and religion). Muslims make up about three-quarters of the population, t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Niger–Congo Languages
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic–Congo languages, Atlantic-Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of languages that are difficult to classify. If valid, Niger-Congo would be the world's largest in terms of member languages, the third-largest in terms of speakers, and Languages of Africa, Africa's largest in terms of geographical area.Irene Thompson"Niger-Congo Language Family" "aboutworldlanguages", March 2015 It is generally considered to be the world's largest language family in terms of the number of distinct languages, just ahead of Austronesian languages, Austronesian, although this is complicated by the Dialect#Dialect or language, ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language; the number of named Niger–Congo languages listed by ''Ethnologue'' is 1,540. If valid, it would be the third-largest lang ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mande Languages
The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples and include Maninka, Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Kpelle, Dioula, Bozo, Mende, Susu, and Vai. There are "60 to 75 languages spoken by 30 to 40 million people", chiefly in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast, and also in northwestern Nigeria and northern Benin. The Mande languages show lexical similarities with the Atlantic–Congo language family, and the two have been classified together as a Niger–Congo language family since the 1950s. However, the Mande languages lack the noun-class morphology that is the primary identifying feature of the Atlantic–Congo languages. Without the help of that feature, a demonstration of the validity of Niger–Congo will require reconstructing both Proto-Mande and Proto-Atlantic–Congo. Until that work is done, linguists have increasingly decided to treat Mande and Atlantic–Co ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mende Language
Mende (''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. In southern Sierra Leone, it is the regional lingua franca that allows all tribes to communicate. Mende is a tonal language belonging to the Mande language family. Early systematic descriptions of Mende were by F. W. Migeod and Kenneth Crosby. Written forms In 1921, Kisimi Kamara invented a syllabary for Mende he called Kikakui (𞠂𞠁𞠀 / ). The script achieved widespread use for a time, but has largely been replaced with an alphabet based on the Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greece, Greek city of Cumae, in southe ..., and the Mende script is conside ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mande Language
The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples and include Maninka, Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Kpelle, Dioula, Bozo, Mende, Susu, and Vai. There are "60 to 75 languages spoken by 30 to 40 million people", chiefly in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast, and also in northwestern Nigeria and northern Benin. The Mande languages show lexical similarities with the Atlantic–Congo language family, and the two have been classified together as a Niger–Congo language family since the 1950s. However, the Mande languages lack the noun-class morphology that is the primary identifying feature of the Atlantic–Congo languages. Without the help of that feature, a demonstration of the validity of Niger–Congo will require reconstructing both Proto-Mande and Proto-Atlantic–Congo. Until that work is done, linguists have increasingly decided to treat Mande and Atlantic–Co ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Languages Of Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is a multilingual country. English language, English is the official language, and Krio is the most widely spoken language among the different ethnic groups across Sierra Leone. Other major languages include Mende, which is spoken by 31% of the population as a mother tongue and is also widely spoken in the southern, and most of the Eastern part of Sierra Leone. Temne, which is spoken by 32% as a mother tongue, is also widely spoken in the northern province and the north Western province. Other languages include Kono, Kissi, Kuranko, Limba, Fula ( Pular), Mandingo and Susu. In 2002, in a gesture of gratitude to Bangladesh for the contributions of the Bangladesh UN Peacekeeping Force deployed in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002, the President of Sierra Leone Ahmad Tejan Kabbah declared Bengali as an honorary official language of Sierra Leone. Although English, as the official language, is spoken in schools, government administration and the media, Krio is sp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Unclassified Languages Of Africa
The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families: * Niger–Congo or perhaps Atlantic–Congo languages (includes Bantu and non-Bantu, and possibly Mande and others) are spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa. *Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. *Indo-European languages are spoken in South Africa and Namibia (Afrikaans, English, German) and are used as lingua francas in the former colonies of Britain and Liberia that was part of American Colonization Society (English), former colonies of France and of Belgium (French), former colonies of Portugal (Portuguese), former colonies of Italy (Italian), former colonies of Spain (Spanish) and the current Spanish territories of Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands and the current French territories of Mayotte and La Réunion. *Various families of Nilo-Saharan languages (unity debated) are spoken from Tanzania to Eri ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Extinct Languages Of Africa
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point. Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively. This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly "reappears" (typically in the fossil record) after a period of apparent absence. More than 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth, amounting to over five billion species, are estimated to have died out. It is estimated that there are currently around 8.7 million species of eukaryote globally, and possibly many times more if microorganisms, like bacteria, are included. Notable extinct animal species include non-avian dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, dodos, ma ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |