Mende | |
---|---|
Mɛnde yia | |
Spoken in | Sierra Leone, Liberia |
Region | South central Sierra Leone |
Native speakers | 1,480,000 (date missing) |
Language family |
Niger–Congo ?
|
Writing system | Latin; Kisimi Kamara's Mende syllabary |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-2 | men |
ISO 639-3 | men |
Mende (Mɛnde yia) is a major language of Sierra Leone, with some speakers in neighboring Liberia. 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 branch of the Niger–Congo language family. 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 orthography using the Latin alphabet.
It was used extensively in the movies Amistad and Blood Diamond.