Mende language


Mende is a major language of Sierra Leone, with some speakers in neighboring Liberia and Guinea. It is spoken by the Mende people and by other ethnic groups as a regional lingua franca in southern Sierra Leone.
Mende is a tonal language belonging to the Mande language family. Early systematic descriptions of Mende were by F. W. Migeod and Kenneth Crosby. Ethel Aginsky decoded the language in her doctoral work.

Phonology

Vowels

Mende is commonly described as having 5 tones: high, low, rising, falling, rising-falling. These serve as relative tones within a downstep system, though some researchers propose it has extra tones with a multi-level system as opposed to a binary one.

Written forms

In 1921, Kisimi Kamara invented a syllabary for Mende he called Kikakui. The script achieved widespread use for a time, but has largely been replaced with an alphabet based on the Latin script, 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.

Media

Film

Mende was used extensively in the films Amistad and Blood Diamond and was the subject of the documentary film The Language You Cry In about the connections between the Gullah people of present-day Georgia and their ancestors from Sierra Leone, beginning with the work of Lorenzo Dow Turner who documented Gullah memories of the Mende language.

Oral literature

In 1908, F.W.H. Migeod, a British civil servant, published The Mende Language, which contains 17 stories in Mende with facing-text English translations, along with 13 Mende songs.
Ralph Eberl-Elber, an Austrian ethnologist, published two Mende tales with English translations as he heard them in Sierra Leone in the 1935.
The American anthropologist Marion Dusser de Barenne Kilson worked with Mende storytellers in Sierra Leone as a graduate student in 1959 and 1960. Marion Kilson then returned to Sierra Leone in 1972 for further research and in 1976 she published Royal Antelope and Spider: West African Mende Tales, which contains 100 Mende folktales in both the original Mende and in English translation. The introduction provides an overview of Mende culture along with detailed information about Mende storytelling traditions.
For Mende proverbs in Mende and English translation, see "Some Mεnde Proverbs," an article published by M. Mary Senior in 1947.

Sample text

''Numuvuisia Kpɛlɛɛ ta ti le tɛ yɛ nduwɔ ya hu, tao ti nuvuu yei kɛɛ ti lɔnyi maa hɛwungɔ. Kiiya kɛɛ hindaluahu gɔɔla a yɛlɔ ti hun. Fale mahoungɔ ti ti nyɔnyɔhu hoi kia ndeegaa.''

Translation

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
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