Maninka language


Maninka, or more precisely Eastern Maninka, is the name of several closely related languages and dialects of the southeastern Manding subgroup of the Mande branch of the Niger–Congo languages. It is the mother tongue of the Malinké people in Guinea, where it is spoken by 3,300,000 people and is the main language in the Upper Guinea region, and in Mali, where the closely related Bambara is a national language, as well as in Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, where it has no official status. It was the language of court and government during the Mali Empire.

Phonology

The Wudala dialect of Eastern Maninka, spoken in the central highlands of Guinea and comprehensible to speakers of all dialects in that country, has the following phonemic inventory.
;Tones
There are two moraic tones, high and low, which in combination form rising and falling tones.
The marker for definiteness is a falling floating tone: 'a bird', 'the bird' ; 'a belly', 'the belly'.
;Vowels
Vowel qualities are. All may be long or short, oral or nasal: and. Nasal vowels nasalize some following consonants.
;Consonants
mnɲ
bd~ɾɟg~gb
ptck
fsh
wlj

/d/ typically becomes a flap between vowels. /ty/ often becomes /k/ before the vowels /i/ or /ɛ/. There is regional variation between /g/ and the labial-velar /gb/. /h/ occurs mostly in Arabic loans, and is established. /p/ occurs in French and English loans, and is in the process of stabilizing.
Several voiced consonants become nasals after a nasal vowel. /b/ becomes /m/, /y/ becomes /ny/, and /l/ becomes /n/. For example, nouns ending in oral vowels take the plural in -lu; nouns ending in nasal vowels take -nu. However, /d/ remains oral, as in /nde/ "I, me".

Writing

Maninka in Guinea is written in an official Latin-based script, an older official orthography, and the N'Ko alphabet.