| Mande | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | West Africa |
| Ethnicity | Mandé peoples |
| Linguistic classification | Niger–Congo?
|
| Proto-language | Proto-Mande |
| Subdivisions |
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-5 | dmn |
| Linguasphere | 00- (phylozone) |
| Glottolog | mand1469 |
 | |
The Mande languages are a family of languages spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples. They include Maninka (Malinke), Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Kpelle, Jula (Dioula), Bozo, Mende, Susu, and Vai. There are around 60 to 75 languages spoken by 30 to 40 million people,[1] chiefly in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) and also in southern Mauritania, northern Ghana, northwestern Nigeria and northern Benin.
The Mande languages show a few lexical similarities with the Atlantic–Congo language family, so together they have been proposed as parts of a larger 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. Accordingly, linguists increasingly treat Mande and Atlantic–Congo as independent language families.[2][3]
- ^ Vydrin, Valentin (2018). "Mande Languages". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.397. ISBN 978-0-19-938465-5.
- ^ Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. (2008). "Language Ecology and Linguistic Diversity on the African Continen t". Language and Linguistics Compass. 2 (5): 840–858. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00085.x. ISSN 1749-818X.
- ^ Güldemann, Tom (2018). "Historical linguistics and genealogical language classification in Africa". In Güldemann, Tom (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of Africa. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 11. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 58–444. doi:10.1515/9783110421668-002. ISBN 978-3-11-042606-9. S2CID 133888593.
Overall, unless more robust and systematic evidence is brought forward, the long-standing but vague idea that Mande is distant from the rest of Niger-Kordofanian as one of its earliest offshoots should give way to the neutral assessment that it is a family without a proven genealogical affiliation (p. 192).