Southern Mande | |
---|---|
Southeastern Mande | |
Geographic distribution | Ivory Coast, Liberia |
Linguistic classification | Niger–Congo
|
Glottolog | sout3140 [1] |
The Southern Mande languages (called 'Southeastern Mande' in Kastenholz, who calls the superior Southeastern Mande node 'Eastern') are a branch of the Mande languages spoken across Ivory Coast and into Liberia.
The following internal classification is from Dwyer (1989, 1996), as summarized in Williamson & Blench 2000. [2]
Southern Mande |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Vydrin (2009) places Mwan with Guro-Yaure. [3]
There is also an extinct Gbin language. Paperno classifies Gbin and Beng as two primary branches of Southern Mande.[ citation needed ]
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over nearly the entirety of Sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic–Congo languages, 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 Africa's largest in terms of geographical area. It is generally considered to be the world's largest language family in terms of the number of distinct languages, just ahead of Austronesian, although this is complicated by the ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language; the number of named Niger–Congo languages listed by Ethnologue is 1,540.
The Kra–Dai languages are a language family of tonal languages found in Mainland Southeast Asia, Southern China and Northeast India. They include Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos respectively. Around 93 million people speak Kra–Dai languages, 60% of whom speak Thai. Ethnologue lists 95 languages in the family, with 62 of these being in the Tai branch.
The Senufo or Senufic languages has around 15 languages spoken by the Senufo in the north of Ivory Coast, the south of Mali and the southwest of Burkina Faso. An isolated language, Nafaanra, is also spoken in the west of Ghana. The Senufo languages constitute their own branch of the Atlantic–Congo sub-family of the Niger–Congo languages. Garber (1987) estimates the total number of Senufos at some 1.5 million; the Ethnologue, based on various population estimates, counts 2.7 million. The Senufo languages are bounded to the west by Mande languages, to the south by Kwa languages, and to the north and east by Central Gur 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.
Muskogean is a language family spoken in different areas of the Southeastern United States. Though the debate concerning their interrelationships is ongoing, the Muskogean languages are generally divided into two branches, Eastern Muskogean and Western Muskogean. Typologically, Muskogean languages are agglutinative. One documented language, Apalachee, is extinct and the remaining languages are critically endangered.
Volta–Congo is a hypothetical major branch of languages of the Niger–Congo family. It includes all the Niger-Congo languages and subfamilies except the families of the erstwhile Atlantic and Kordofanian branches, Mande, Dogon, Ijo and Balanta. It thus only differs from Atlantic–Congo in that it excludes the Atlantic languages and, in some conceptions, Kru and Senufo.
Ijoid is a proposed but undemonstrated group of languages linking the Ijaw languages (Ịjọ) with the endangered Defaka language. The similarities, however, may be due to Ijaw influence on Defaka.
Ivory Coast is a multilingual country with an estimated 78 languages currently spoken.
The Ijawlanguages, also spelt Ịjọ, are the languages spoken by the Ijo people in southern Nigeria.
The Bʼaga languages, also known as Gumuz, form small language family spoken along the border of Ethiopia and Sudan. They have been tentatively classified as closes to the Koman languages within the Nilo-Saharan language family.
The Engan, or more precisely Enga – Southern Highland languages are a small family of Papuan languages of the highlands of Papua New Guinea. The two branches of the family are rather distantly related, but were connected by Franklin and Voorhoeve (1973).
The Lower Sepik a.k.a. Nor–Pondo languages are a small language family of East Sepik Province in northern Papua New Guinea. They were identified as a family by K Laumann in 1951 under the name Nor–Pondo, and included in Donald Laycock's now-defunct 1973 Sepik–Ramu family.
Guro (Gouro), also known as Kweni (Kwéndré) and Lo, is a Mande language spoken by approximately a million people in Ivory Coast, primarily in the areas of Haut-Sassandra and Marahoue, and the Goh.
Beng (Ben) is a Mande language of Ivory Coast. The Ngen dialect, perhaps a closely related language, is spelled various ways, including Gan, Ngain, Ngan, Ngin, Nguin.
Gbin (Gbĩ) is an extinct Mande language of Ivory Coast, neighboring but not closely related to Beng. The only significant attestation is Delafosse (1904). Paperno describes Beng and Gbin as two primary branches of Southern Mande.
N'Ko (ߒߞߏ) is a standardized unified koiné form of several Manding languages written in the N'Ko alphabet. It is used in Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and some other West African countries, primarily, but not exclusively in written form, whereas in actual speech the different Manding varieties are used: Maninka, Bambara, Dyula and others.
Goo is a recently discovered Mande language of Ivory Coast. It is close to Dan and Tura, but intelligible with neither.
Valentin Feodosyevich Vydrin is a Russian Africanist. Until 2011, he was the head of the Department of Ethnography of African Peoples of the Kunstkamera, Professor, Doctor of Philology. He is a Graduate of the Department of African Studies of the Faculty of Eastern Studies of the Saint Petersburg State University, where he was later a lecturer. He is an author of numerous scientific works, published in Russian, French, and English, on the topic of Mande languages, including dictionaries and treatises on grammatical features.
The Eastern Mande languages are a branch of the Mande languages spoken in three areas: northwest Burkina Faso, the border region of northern Benin and Nigeria, and a single language (Bissa) spoken in Ghana.
This article about Mande languages is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |