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The Mande languages are a family of languages spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples. They include Maninka language, Mandinka, Soninke language, Bambara language, Kpelle language, Dyula language, Bozo languages, Mende language, Susu language, and Vai language. There are around 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, Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) and also in southern Mauritania, northern Ghana, northwestern Nigeria and northern Benin.
The Mande languages show a few lexical similarities with the Atlantic–Congo language family, so together they have been proposed as parts of a larger Niger–Congo language family since the 1950s. However, the Mande languages lack the noun-class morphology that is the primary identifying feature of the Atlantic–Congo languages. Accordingly, linguists increasingly treat Mande and Atlantic–Congo as independent language families.
Valentin Vydrin concluded that "the Mande Urheimat at the second half of the 4th millennium BC was located in Southern Sahara, somewhere to the North of 16° or even 18° of Northern latitude and between 3° and 12° of Western longitude.". That is now Mauritania and southern Western Sahara.
If Mande's linguistic affiliation were clearer that would help inform its history. For example, Joseph Greenberg suggested that the Niger-Congo group, which in his view includes the Mande language family, began to break up at around 7000 years Before Present. Its speakers would have practised a Neolithic culture, as indicated by the Proto-Niger-Congo words for "cow", "goat" and "cultivate".
In 1958, Welmers published an article called "The Mande Languages," where he divided the languages into three subgroups: North-West, South and East. His conclusion was based on lexicostatistics research. Joseph Greenberg followed that distinction in his The Languages of Africa (1963). Long (1971) and Gérard Galtier (1980) follow the distinction into three groups but with notable differences.
Without definitively concluding that Mande is or is not a member of Niger–Congo, Vydrin (2016) notes that proto-Mande basic vocabulary fits relatively well with Niger–Congo, and that typological criteria such as the absence of a noun-class system should not be taken as probative; he notes that "If the position of Mande within Niger-Congo is confirmed... Mande will certainly represent the most ancient branching of the phylum". Blench regards it as an early branch that diverged before the noun-class morphology developed. Dwyer (1998) compared it with other branches of Niger–Congo and finds that they form a coherent family, with Mande being the most divergent of the branches he considered. A preliminary study from 2024 suggests that a relationship between the Mande and Atlantic-Congo branches is plausible based on reconstructed lexical items.
Most internal Mande classifications are based on lexicostatistics, for example, that based on the Swadesh list. An alternative classification from Kastenholz (1996) is based on lexical innovations and comparative linguistics. Kastenholz warns however that this is not based on objective criteria and thus is not a genealogical classification in the narrow sense. The following classification is acompilation of both.
Vydrin (2009) differs somewhat from this: he places Soso-Jalonke with Southwestern (a return to André Prost 1953); Soninke-Bozo, Samogho and Bobo as independent branches of Western Mande, and Mokole with Vai-Kono. Most classifications place Jo within Samogo.
| *tɔ́ko |
| *tɔgɔ |
| *tɔ |
| *tɔ́ |
Below are some cognates from D. J. Dwyer (1988) ( is or ):
| laqqe | le, di |
| laxan-ji | liri |
| ji | yi |
| konbe | ɲoŋ |
| -xatti | n-yoŋ-yi |
| sugo | bɔ |
| diggeh | bɔ-guren |
| jaxe | bla |
Note that in these cognates:
| bʊ̀ |
| kwi |
| kurì |
| kwi |
| kurì |
| kōōrì |
| kōːlì |
| korì |
| wókòì |
| flè / fʊ̀ |
| bù |
| vu |
| fù |
| vũ̀ |
| ebu |
| vù |
| vu |
| sɔ́jɔlú |
| tɑ̄ |
| táàn / táa |
| tan / tan |
| tán tã́ |
| tan tã́ |
| tan tã́ |
| tan |
| táŋ |
| táŋ |
| tan |
| tán |
| tan |
| taŋ |
| tán |
| tâŋ |
| fuú |
| fù |
| fuu |
| pòǔ |
| puu |
| pù̀(ɡɔ̀) |
| puu |
| pû(ŋ), púù(ŋ) |
| púu |
| puu(ŋ), kapuu(ŋ) |
| kapu |
| puú |
| ceũ |
| tsjéù |
| bʒĩĩ |
| tó |
| m̥ḿ̩ |
| fʊ̃̀ |
| tã̄ |
| tá |
| tã́ |
| tan |
| tʃɛ́mí |
| tʃɛmi / tʃami |
| tã́mú / tãmi |
The following is a recently proposed tentative consonant system:
| +Proto-Mande Consonants |
Proto-Mande had a consonant system that included plosive, implosives, fricatives, and approximants. It likely lacked phonemic nasal consonants, instead having them as allophones of other sounds. The phonetic nasals m and n are analyzed as allophones of the implosives /ɓ/ and /ɗ/, while ɲ and ŋ were allophones of the approximants /j/ and /w/. These nasal allophones occurred when positioned next to nasalized vowels.
Nasals are broadly phonemic in modern Mande languages, but they tend to be allophonic in the Southern group; Vydrin argues this system is preserved from Proto-Mande. The proto-language's lack of phonemic nasal stops helps explain the absence or rarity of combinations of nasals with semi-closed vowels (e.g., *me, *ne, *ɲe, *mo, *no, *ɲo) in many Western Mande languages.
Below are the ancestral vowels, adapted from a reconstruction by Vydrin:
| +Proto-Mande Vowels |
Proto-Mande had 9 oral vowels, 5 nasal vowels, and a syllabic nasal, denoted in reconstructions by *N. Vowel length was likely contrastive as well. It is believed that the proto-language, like its descendants, was tonal, with a system that included two tones. Many modern dialects have developed more than two tones, particularly the Southern Mande languages.
For a preliminary list of reconstructed lexical items, see .
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