Mende (''Mɛnde yia'') is a major language of

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 ...

, with some speakers in neighboring

Liberia Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to its northwest, Guinea to its north, Ivory Coast to its east, and the Atlantic Ocean to its south and southwest. It ...

and Guinea. It is spoken by the

Mende people The Mende are one of the two largest ethnic groups in Sierra Leone; their neighbours, the Temne people, constitute the largest ethnic group at 35.5% of the total population, which is slightly larger than the Mende at 31.2%. The Mende are pr ...

and by other

ethnic groups An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history ...

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 Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

belonging to the Mande language family. Early systematic descriptions of Mende were by F. W. Migeod and

Kenneth Crosby Kenneth Crosby (1904–1998) was a British Wesleyan missionary, a Bible translator and language scholar, who worked in Sierra Leone. He is best known for his work in the Mende language. Crosby was born on 12 May 1904 at Briton Ferry, near Neath ...

Written forms

In 1921,

Kisimi Kamara Kisimi Kamara (1890–1962) was a simple village tailor from Sierra Leone who gave his people the gift of writing. He invented the Mende syllabary in 1921. Early life Kisimi Kamara was born in 1890 in the village of Vaama, Pujehun District in t ...

invented a syllabary for Mende he called Kikakui (𞠂𞠁𞠀 / Ki-ka-ku

). The script achieved widespread use for a time, but has largely been replaced with an

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a s ...

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 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.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

In films

Mende was used extensively in the films '' Amistad'' and '' Blood Diamond'' and was the subject of the documentary film ''The Language You Cry In''.

References

External links

Bibliography on MendePanAfrican L10n page on Mende, Bandi & LokoOLAC resources in and about the Mende language
Mande languages Languages of Sierra Leone Languages of Liberia Mende people {{Mande-lang-stub