The Mandinka language, sometimes referred to as Mandingo, is a Mandé language spoken by some 1.2 million Mandinka people in Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau; it is the main language of The Gambia. It belongs to the Manding branch of Mandé, and is thus fairly similar to Bambara and Maninka or Malinké. Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... Map showing the distribution of Niger-Congo languages The Niger-Congo languages constitute one of the worlds major language families, and Africas largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. ... Mandé is the name of an ethnic group or nation, as well as a group of languages which are spoken in several countries in West Africa, including Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mendé, Yacouba, and Vai. ... Mande (or Manding) is the name of a group of languages which are spoken in several countries in West Africa, including Mandinka and Bambara. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code Twenty-two of the languages have two three-letter codes: a code for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B) a code for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T). ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of sounds and the human voice. ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... This chart shows concisely the most common way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is applied to represent the English language. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé people and include Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mende, Susu, Yacouba, Vai, and Ligbi. ... The Mandinka (also known as Mandingo) are a Mande people of West Africa, all descend physically or culturally from the ancient Mali Empire which controlled the trans-Saharic trade from the Middle East to West Africa. ... Mande (or Manding) is the name of a group of languages which are spoken in several countries in West Africa, including Mandinka and Bambara. ... Bambara, also known as Bamanankan in the language itself, is a language spoken in Mali by as many as six million people (including second language users). ... Maninka is a Niger-Congo; Mande language spoken by 3,300,000 (including all varieties) in Guinea and Mali where it is the official langauge and also in Liberia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone where it has no official status. ...

Orthography

Latin alphabet and Arabic alphabet-based orthographies are widely used for Mandinka; the former is official, but the latter is more widely used and older. In addition, the pan-Mandé writing system, the N'Ko alphabet, invented in 1949, is often used. The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing Arabic and various other languages, together with various closely related scripts that typically differ in the presence or absence of a few letters. ... Mandé is an ethnic group of West Africa. ... The word NKo written in the NKo alphabet NKo 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. ...

In the Latin script, c represents /ʧ/, ŋ /ŋ/, and ñ /ɲ/; the letters v, x, z, and q are not used. Vowels are as in Spanish, 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:

Letters in italics are not normally used in native Mandinka words. ه (h) may also be used to indicate a final glottal stop, 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 glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages. ...

The vowels correspond as follows (diacritics are placed over or under the consonant in Arabic):

In addition, a small Arabic 2 (۲) may be used to indicate reduplication, and the hamza may be used as in Arabic to indicate glottal stops more precisely. Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, or only part of it, is repeated. ...

Bibliography

• R. T. Addis, A Study on the Writing of Mandinka in Arabic script, 1963.

External links

• Wolof and Mandinka resources, including a grammar and dictionary
• Electronic books in Mandinka, freely downloadable in the PDF format

PDF is an abbreviation with several meanings: Portable Document Format Post-doctoral fellowship Probability density function There also is an electronic design automation company named PDF Solutions. ...

See also

• Mande languages
• Manding languages
• Mandinka people
• Mandé
• Malinké