The
Mandinka language is a Mandé language spoken by millions of
Mandinka peopleThe Mandinka, Malinke are one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa with an estimated population of eleven million ....
in
MaliMali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...
,
SenegalSenegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
,
The GambiaThe Republic of The Gambia, commonly referred to as The Gambia, or Gambia , is a country in West Africa. Gambia is the smallest country on mainland Africa, surrounded by Senegal except for a short coastline on the Atlantic Ocean in the west....
,
GuineaGuinea , officially the Republic of Guinea , is a country in West Africa. Formerly known as French Guinea , it is today sometimes called Guinea-Conakry to distinguish it from its neighbour Guinea-Bissau. Guinea is divided into eight administrative regions and subdivided into thirty-three prefectures...
,
Côte d'IvoireThe Republic of Côte d'Ivoire or Ivory Coast is a country in West Africa. It has an area of , and borders the countries Liberia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana; its southern boundary is along the Gulf of Guinea. The country's population was 15,366,672 in 1998 and was estimated to be...
,
Burkina FasoBurkina Faso – also known by its short-form name Burkina – is a landlocked country in west Africa. It is surrounded by six countries: Mali to the north, Niger to the east, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana to the south, and Côte d'Ivoire to the southwest.Its size is with an estimated...
,
Sierra LeoneSierra Leone , officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Guinea to the north and east, Liberia to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west and southwest. Sierra Leone covers a total area of and has an estimated population between 5.4 and 6.4...
,
LiberiaLiberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...
, and
Guinea-BissauThe Republic of Guinea-Bissau is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Senegal to the north, and Guinea to the south and east, with the Atlantic Ocean to its west....
and
ChadChad , officially known as the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west...
; it is the main language of The Gambia. It belongs to the
MandingThe Manding languages are a fairly mutually intelligible group of dialects or languages in West Africa, belonging to the Mande languages. Their best-known members are Bambara, the most widely spoken language in Mali; Mandinka, the main language of Gambia; Maninka or Malinké, a major language of...
branch of Mandé, and is thus fairly similar to
BambaraBambara, more correctly known as Bamanankan , its designation in the language itself , is a language spoken in Mali by as many as six million people...
and
Maninka or MalinkéManinka, or more precisely Eastern Maninka, is the name of several closely related languages and dialects of the southeastern Manding subgroup of the Mande branch of the Niger–Congo languages...
. In a majority of areas, it is tonal language with two tones: low and high, although the particular variety spoken in
The GambiaThe Republic of The Gambia, commonly referred to as The Gambia, or Gambia , is a country in West Africa. Gambia is the smallest country on mainland Africa, surrounded by Senegal except for a short coastline on the Atlantic Ocean in the west....
and
SenegalSenegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
is non-tonal and uses a
pitch accentPitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
.
Orthography
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
and
Arabic alphabetThe Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
-based orthographies are widely used for Mandinka; the former is official, but the latter is more widely used and older. In addition, the pan-
MandéMandé or Manden is a large group of related ethnic groups in West Africa who speak any of the many Mande languages spread throughout the region. Various Mandé groups are found in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Chad, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger,...
writing system, the
N'KoN'Ko is both a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Mande languages of West Africa, and the name of the literary language itself written in the script. The term N'Ko means 'I say' in all Manding languages....
alphabet, invented in 1949, is often used in north east Guinea, and bordering communities in Côte d'Ivoire and Mali.
In the Latin script, c represents /t͡ʃ/, ŋ /ŋ/, and ñ /ɲ/; the letters v, x, z, and q are not used. Vowels are as in Spanish or Italian, and are doubled to indicate length or distinguish words that are otherwise homophones.
The Arabic script uses no extra letters (apart from, rarely, an extra vowel mark for
e), but some of the letters are pronounced differently from in Arabic.
The Latin and Arabic consonants correspond as follows:
| Arabic |
ا |
ع |
ب |
ت |
ط |
ض |
ج |
ه |
ح |
خ |
د |
ر |
س |
ش |
ص |
ث |
ظ |
ڢ |
ل |
م |
ن |
و |
ي |
ك |
لا |
| Latin |
('), aa, ee |
(', with madda ŋ) |
b, p |
t |
t |
t |
c, j |
h |
h |
|
d |
r |
s |
s (sh) |
s |
s |
s |
f |
l |
m |
n, ñ, ŋ |
w |
y |
k, g |
la |
Letters in italics are not normally used in native Mandinka words. ه (h) may also be used to indicate a final
glottal stopThe glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
, which is not noted in the Latin script. The letter ŋ of the Latin script is often indicated with vowel signs in the Arabic script; see below.
The vowels correspond as follows (diacritics are placed over or under the consonant in Arabic):
| Arabic |
ـَ |
ـِ |
ـُ |
ـْ |
ـִ |
ـً |
ـٍ |
ـٌ |
ـَا |
ـِي |
ـُو |
| Latin |
a, e |
i, e, ee |
o, u |
(no following vowel) |
e |
aŋ, eŋ |
iŋ, eeŋ, eŋ |
oŋ, uŋ |
aa |
ii |
oo, uu |
| Mandinka names of Arabic marks: |
sira tilidiŋo; |
sira tilidiŋo duuma; |
ŋoo biriŋo; |
sira murumuruliŋo; |
tambi baa duuma; |
sira tilindiŋo fula; |
sira tilindiŋo duuma fula; |
ŋoo biriŋo fula. |
|
|
|
In addition, a small Arabic 2 (۲) may be used to indicate
reduplicationReduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
, and the
hamza may be used as in Arabic to indicate glottal stops more precisely.
External links