Unique Languages of Africa

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The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé people and include Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Bissa, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mende, Susu, Yacouba, Vai, and Ligbi. The population includes millions of speakers, chiefly in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. This linguistic group is traditionally considered a divergent branch of the Niger-Congo family.

The group was first recognized in 1854 by S. W. Koelle in his Polyglotta Africana. He mentioned 13 languages under the heading North-Western High-Sudan Family, or Mandéga Family of Languages. In 1901 Maurice Delafosse made a distinction of two groups in his Essai de manuel pratique de la langue mandé ou mandingue. He speaks of a northern group mandé-tan and a southern group mandé-fu. This distinction was basically done only because the languages in the north use the expression tan for ten whereas the southern group use fu. In 1924 L. Tauxier noted that this distinction is not well founded and there is at least a third subgroup he called mandé-bu. It is not until 1950 when A. Prost supports this view and gives further details. In 1958 Welmers published an article The Mande Languages where he divided the languages into three subgroups - North-West, South and East. His conclusion was based on lexicostatistic research. Greenberg followed this distinction in his The Languages of Africa (1963). Long (1971) and G. Galtier (1980) follow the distinction into three groups but with notable differences.

Mande does not share the morphology characteristic of most of the Niger-Congo family, such as the noun-class system. Blench regards it as an early branch that—like Ijoid and perhaps Dogon—diverged before this developed. However, Dimmendaal (2008) argues that the evidence for inclusion is slim, with no new evidence for decades, and that for now Mande is best considered an independent family.[1]

Most internal Mande classifications are based on lexicostatistics, and the results are unreliable. The following classification from Kastenholz (1996) is based on lexical innovations and comparative linguistics; details of East Mande are from Dwyer (1989, 1996) [summarized in Williamson & Blench 2000].

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www.jstor.org/pss/715818
Fulani Grammar by S Ross


She is stating, back in the 1920s, that Fulani language is a daughter of Bantu. And that the Hamitic Languages and Bantu are siblings. Thoughts?


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OUTLINE OF A LEXICOSTATISTICAL STUDY
OF BASQUE AND THE MANDE LANGUAGES,
WITH A NOTE ON FULA
Hans G. MUKAROVSKY
This paper does not claim to be a com- leted piece of work, but is simply
a piece of information. So I have drafte 1 ale following limes rather quickly,
just to give you an idea about this topic.
Lexicostatistics have been applied to Basque and various languages, but
scarcely to languages of Africa. The Mande Languages form a coherent
linguistic unit in West Africa. They number 30 to 40 distinct languages, or
dialect clusters, and are spread from eastern Senegal to western Upper Volta,
scattered groups being found still further eastward. Their speakers number
several millions. They constitute the majority of the population in the
Gambia, and foremost in Mali, and form important groups in several other
West African countries.
Speakers of northern Mande Languages have, in the Middle Ages,
formed the great Empires of Ghana and Mali, known to European geographers
before the discovery of West Africa by sea. We may assume that they
were descendants of an old Saharan population which has been driven
southward by progressive desiccation.{THIS IS A COMMON THEME] As they had moved into the Western
Sahel and Savannah some• of them penetrated the rain forest zone.
The Mande Languages were classified, in my opinion wrongly, among
the Nigritic languages which cover the largest part of Africa south of the
Sahara. In fact this view has already been abandoned by a part of Africanists.
Others cling to the idea, that Mande has seperated first, before any other
linguistic entity, from the Common Nigritic stock. In any case the Mande
Languages are fairly different, in lexis as in structure, from the 'Nigritic'
Languages of West Africa.
I have tried to relate these languages to Basque as long time ago as 1964,
but have not found much esteem for this idea. So I have left the question
where it was and began to enlarge the field of comparison. The results of a
[1] 199
HANS G. MUKAROVSKY
lexicostatistical test undertaken in 1966 convinced me that Mande must be
related to Hamito-Semitic, and that it is closer to Cushitic und Chadic than to
its northern branches Berber and Semitic. In a later study I have demonstrated,
in 1972, that the common numeral system of the Mande languages
strongly resembles to that of Central Cushitic.
Asserting the relationship of a group of West African with other African
languages is not queer, but simply a case that has to be proven. The question
is whether the proofs given are considered as valid and sufficient. But for us it
involves-another conclusion. If we accept that Basque is related to Hamito-
Semitic it will follow that Basque is also related to Mande, whatever the level
of that relationship is. Of course it should be higher than that of a simple
family. This relationship can, however, become visible by applying lexicostatistics.

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more
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Comparative studies of the Mande Languages are not yet advanced very
far. We cannot exclude at present that some similarities will turn out to be
only superficial, and due to sheer coincidence. But certainly a certain
percentage of them are valid, and sufficient to prove genetic relationship to
Basque.
But perhaps you are puzzled how West African languages can display
similarities to Basque to such an extent. I assume that the Mande Languages
form another branch of the Macro-Erythraic linguistic network, just so as
does Hamito-Semitic. Geographically their area is situated still nearer to
South-Western Europe than any branch of Hamito-Semitic except Berber
which has spread to the West of North Africa only from the second
millenium B. C. on, while Mande has probably been spoken further in the
North than it is to-day.
This has led me to assume the existence of a linguistic family which I
have proposed to call Euro-Saharan,****Ha! ha! ha! *****and which would have been a Western
sister family of Hamito-Semitic. Basque and its relatives in Western Europe
which have become extinct, as well as Mande and other African languages
once spoken in North Africa and in the Saharan area were its members.
Note on Fula.
There exist, and have to be still explored in this respect, other African
languages which are related to Basque. I shall conclude chis paper by a short
note on one of them.
Fula (or Peul in French terminology) is a very far-spread West African
languages, spoken by several millions of people from the Senegal River to the
East of Lake Chad. It is absolutedly not related to Mande on a recognizable
level, and its alleged relations to other languages of.West Africa are uncertain.
It forms a closer linguistic unit only with two other Senegalian languages,
Wolof and Serer.

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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). The differences between Bambara and Dioula are minimal. Dioula is a language spoken or understood, by fewer numbers of people, in Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, and Gambia. The Bambara language is primarily spoken by members of the Bambara ethnic group, numbering about 2,700,000 people, but serves also as an interethnic language of Mali.

Bambara belongs to a group of closely-related languages called Manding, within the larger Mandé group. It is an SOV language and has two tones. It uses seven vowels a, e, ?, i, o, ? and u (the letters approximate their IPA equivalents). Writing was introduced during the French occupation and alphabetisation is a major issue especially in rural areas. Although written literature is only slowly evolving (due to the predominance of French as the "language of the educated"), there exists a wealth of oral literature, which is often tales of kings and heroes. This oral literature is mainly tradited by the "Griot" who are a mixture of storytellers, partysingers and human history books who have studied the trade of singing and reciting for many years. Many of their songs are very old and are said to date back to the old kingdom of Mali. Bambara is a national language of Mali, and also the most widely understood language in Mali.

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Attachments:

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The Spread of Cattle Domestication among the Mande speaking people

Agricultural revolutions and the resulting increased food production has been the principal catalyst for the wide spread dispersal of populations speaking similar languages. Using linguistic and archaeological data Peter Bellwood (1991) and Colin Renfrew (1988) have shown the role agriculture played in the dispersal of the Austronesian and Indo-European speakers in prehistoric times.
Recent archaeological research in Africa suggest that although agriculture played a role in the spread of some African linguistic groups such as the Bantu and Cushitic speakers, cattle domestication led to the spread of other African groups across enormous parts of West Africa. This hypothesis suits the evidence we have regarding the spread of the Proto-Mande from the Saharan highlands in the east, to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in the west (Winters 1986b).
Archaeological research from North Africa clearly illustrates the movement of semi-sedentary cattle herders from the Magreb and Saharan sites into West Africa. This agropastoral sedentary economy resulted in a growth in populations great enough to make it possible for the Mande speakers to expand across much of Northwest and West Africa between 5000 and 3000 years before the present (BP).

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The Mande speakers are often associated with the Niger-Congo
family /superset of languages. Wm. Welmers (1971) has postulated an original homeland for the Niger-Congo Superset in the general vicinity of the Upper Nile. Ehret and Posnansky (1982) has suggested that the Mande diverged from the Kwa around 5000-4000 BC Dr. Welmers (1971) has hypothesized that around 3000 BC the Mande languages separated into Northern and Southeastern branches.


The Niger-Congo speakers probably inhabited the plateau and mountain regions of the Sahara: Air, Ennedi, Tibesti and Hoggar.
These highland areas eight thousand years ago formed the "Saharan
Fertile Crescent". The linguistic evidence suggest that the Nilo-
Saharan, Chadic, *****Egyptian***** and other supersets and subsets of languages also lived in this highland paradise.

Posnansky 1982:242). Bimson (1980) has proposed that the Mande migration waves originated from the Inland Niger Delta around 2000 BC.
This is a most attractive theory but it does not conform to the archaeological data collected
Over the past decade in Africa that illustrates that until the second millennium BC the Inland Niger Delta was sparsely populated (McIntosh & McIntosh 1981 ,1986).


In the Sahelian zone there was a short wet phase during the Holocene (c. 7500-4400 BC), which led to the formation of large lakes and marshes in Mauritania, the Niger massifs and Chad. The Inland Niger Delta was unoccupied. In other parts of the Niger area the wet phase existed in the eight/seventh and fourth/third millennia BC (McIntosh & McIntosh 1986:417).
There were few habitable sites in West Africa during the Holocene wet phase.