Loma (Loghoma, Looma, Lorma) is a

Mande Mande may refer to: * Mandé peoples of western Africa * Mande languages * Manding, a term covering a subgroup of Mande peoples, and sometimes used for one of them, Mandinka * Garo people of northeastern India and northern Bangladesh * Mande River ...

language spoken by the

Loma people The Loma people, sometimes called Loghoma, Looma, Lorma or Toma, are a West African ethnic group living primarily in mountainous, sparsely populated regions near the border between Guinea and Liberia. Their population was estimated at 330,000 in ...

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

and

Guinea Guinea ( ),, fuf, 𞤘𞤭𞤲𞤫, italic=no, Gine, wo, Gine, nqo, ߖߌ߬ߣߍ߫, bm, Gine officially the Republic of Guinea (french: République de Guinée), is a coastal country in West Africa. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the we ...

. Dialects of Loma proper in Liberia are Gizima, Wubomei, Ziema, Bunde, Buluyiema. The dialect of Guinea, Toma (Toa, Toale, Toali, or , the

Malinke Maninka (also known as Malinke), or more precisely Eastern Maninka, is the name of several closely related languages and dialects of the southeastern Manding subgroup of the Mande language family. It is the mother tongue of the Malinké peop ...

name for ''Loma''), is an official regional language. In Liberia, the people and language are also known as "Bouze" (Busy, Buzi), which is considered offensive.

Writing systems

Today, Loma uses a Latin-based

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 syll ...

which is written from left to right. A

syllabary In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...

saw limited use in the 1930s and 1940s in correspondence between Loma-speakers, but today has fallen into disuse.

Sample

The

Lord's Prayer The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father or Pater Noster, is a central Christian prayer which Jesus taught as the way to pray. Two versions of this prayer are recorded in the gospels: a longer form within the Sermon on the Mount in the Gosp ...

in Loma:Matthew 6:9-13 in ''Deʋe niinɛ'' ew Testament in Loma

Monrovia Monrovia () is the capital city of the West African country of Liberia. Founded in 1822, it is located on Cape Mesurado on the Atlantic coast and as of the 2008 census had 1,010,970 residents, home to 29% of Liberia’s total population. As the ...

: Bible Society in Liberia, 1971. This excerpt was visible at http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-loma.html, see archived version at https://web.archive.org/web/20160306074512/http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-loma.html.

Hymns

In the 1960s several hymns composed in Loma by Billema Kwillia were recorded by the missionary Margaret D. Miller and then adopted by the Lutheran Church, first appearing in print in Loma in 1970.C. MICHAEL HAWN/S T KIMBROUGH, JR. (with appreciation for information provided by Daniel W. Sopo). "Billema Kwillia." ''The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology.'' Canterbury Press, accessed February 24, 2021, http://www.hymnology.co.uk/b/billema-kwillia. The most widely used, 'A va de laa' was not translated to singable English until 2004; it is also translated to German.

References

Bibliography

* Rude, Noel. 1983. Ergativity and the active-stative typology in Loma. ''Studies in African Linguistics'', 14:265–28

* Sadler, Wesley. 1951. ''Untangled Loma: a course of study of the Looma language of the Western Province, Liberia, West Africa.'' Published by Board of Foreign Missions of the United Lutheran Church in America for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Liberia.

External links

ISO proposal for Looma 'macrolanguage'
Mande languages Languages of Liberia Languages of Guinea Languages written in Latin script {{Mande-lang-stub