Mandinka

E28118

Mandinka is a major Mande language spoken primarily in The Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and neighboring West African countries by the Mandinka people.

Aliases (2)

Statements (48)
Predicate Object
instanceOf Mande language
language
natural language
associatedReligion Islam (majority of speakers)
closelyRelatedTo Bambara
Dioula
Maninka
ethnicGroup Mandinka people
glottocode mand1436
hasAlternativeName Malinke (in some sources)
Mandika
Mandingo
hasDialects regional varieties in Guinea-Bissau
regional varieties in Senegal
regional varieties in The Gambia
hasGrammaticalFeature no grammatical gender
postpositions instead of prepositions
hasLinguisticAncestor Proto-Mande
hasMorphologicalType agglutinative language
hasNumberOfSpeakersEstimate over 1 million speakers
hasPhonologicalFeature tone language
vowel length contrast
hasStandardizationEffort orthography development in The Gambia
hasWordOrder SOV
ISO639-2Code mnk
ISO639-3Code mnk
languageBranch Mande languages
languageFamily Niger–Congo languages
languageGroup Manding languages
region Senegambia
Upper Guinea
spokenIn Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Ivory Coast
Mali
Senegal
Sierra Leone
The Gambia
West Africa
subclassOf Manding language
Western Mande language
usedAs lingua franca in The Gambia
lingua franca in parts of Senegal
usedIn griot storytelling traditions
oral literature of Mandinka people
writingSystem Arabic script
Latin script
N'Ko script


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