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Maninka Language
Maninka (also known as Malinke), or more precisely Eastern Maninka, is the name of several closely related languages and dialects of the southeastern Manding subgroup of the Mande language family. 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.Mamadou Camara (1999) ''Parlons Malinké'' (Apart from tone, which is not written, sounds are given in orthography, as IPA values are not certain.) Tones There are two moraic tones, high and low, which in combinatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guinea
Guinea ( ),, fuf, 𞤘𞤭𞤲𞤫, italic=no, Gine, wo, Gine, nqo, ߖߌ߬ߣߍ߫, bm, Gine officially the Republic of Guinea (french: République de Guinée), is a coastal country in West Africa. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Guinea-Bissau to the northwest, Senegal to the north, Mali to the northeast, Cote d'Ivoire to the southeast, and Sierra Leone and Liberia to the south. It is sometimes referred to as Guinea-Conakry after its capital Conakry, to distinguish it from other territories in the eponymous region such as Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea. It has a population of million and an area of . Formerly French Guinea, it achieved independence in 1958. It has a history of military coups d'état.Nicholas Bariyo & Benoit FauconMilitary Faction Stages Coup in Mineral-Rich Guinea ''Wall Street Journal'' (September 5, 2021).Krista LarsonEXPLAINER: Why is history repeating itself in Guinea's coup? Associated Press (September 7, 2021).Danielle PaquettH ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Labial Consonant
Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in English. A third labial articulation is dentolabials, articulated with the upper lip against the lower teeth (the reverse of labiodental), normally only found in pathological speech. Generally precluded are linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them coronals, though sometimes, they behave as labial consonants. The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is the English one, in which the nasal and the stops, , , and , are bilabial and the fricatives, , and , are labiodental. The voiceless bilabial fricative, voiced bilabial fricative, and the bilabial approximant do not exist as the primary realizations of any sounds in English, bu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of Mali
Mali is a multilingual country. The languages spoken there reflect ancient settlement patterns, migrations, and its long history. ''Ethnologue'' counts more than 80 languages. Of these, French is the official language and Bambara is the most widely spoken. All together 13 of the indigenous languages of Mali have the legal status of national language. Language usage French, which introduced during the colonial period, was retained as the official language at independence and is used in government and formal education. Estimates of the number of people who actually speak French are low. Figures estimated in 1986 give a number of 386,000 speakers of French in Mali, derived from the numbers of school attendees.Anne Lafage. French in Africa. Carol Sanders (ed.) French Today: Language in Its Social Context. pp 215-238. Cambridge University Press (1993) p. 217. This cites a report by the Haut Council du Francophonie, Bull. du FIPF (1986), pp. 10-12. This would mean roughly 21% of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of Guinea
The Republic of Guinea is a multilingual country, with over 40 languages spoken. The official language is French, which was inherited from colonial rule. Several indigenous languages have been given the status of national languages: Fula (or Pular); Malinké (or Maninka); Susu; Kissi; Kpelle (also known in French as Guerzé) and Loma. Government and institutions French is the language of state and of official institutions. It is used as a second language by 15% to 25% of the population, and as a first language by a negligible portion of the population. At the end of the Ahmed Sékou Touré regime, French was the only language used in business and schools. By region Fula (34.6%) is mostly spoken in Middle Guinea, where the major city is Labé. It dominates in the Labé and Mamou regions where it is spoken by 94.5% and 92.4% of the populations respectively. Malinké (24.9%) is mostly spoken in Upper Guinea, where Kankan is the major city. It dominates the Kankan Region wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
N'Ko Alphabet
N'Ko () is a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949, as a modern writing system for the Mandé languages of West Africa. The term ''N'Ko'', which means ''I say'' in all Mandé languages, is also used for the Mandé literary standard written in N'Ko script. The script has a few similarities to the Arabic script, notably its direction (right-to-left) and the letters which are connected at the base. Unlike Arabic, it is obligatory to mark both tone and vowels. N'Ko tones are marked as diacritics, in a similar manner to the marking of some vowels in Arabic. History Kante created N'Ko in response to erroneous beliefs that no indigenous African writing system existed, as well as to provide a better way to write Mandé languages, which had for centuries been written in predominately in Ajami script, which was not perfectly suited to the tones unique to Mandé and common to many West African languages. A widely told story among N'Ko proponents is that Kante was particularly challe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guinean Languages Alphabet
Following independence, the government of Guinea adopted rules of transcription for the languages of Guinea based on the characters and diacritic combinations available on typewriters of that period. This alphabet was used officially until 1989. Guinea language orthography The Guinea alphabet made use of several digraphs (including either "h" or "y" as the second letter), some of which represent consonants not present in European languages, and two diacritics ( grave accent and diaeresis) for open vowels. This system was widely used within the country but differed from the orthographies of neighboring countries of West Africa, as developed in the wake of the 1966 Bamako expert meeting on harmonizing orthographies of the cross-border languages of the region. In 1989, following a meeting on reform of the alphabet in 1988, it was decided to adopt an orthography similar to the African reference alphabet An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Approximant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence. This class is composed of sounds like (as in ''rest'') and semivowels like and (as in ''yes'' and ''west'', respectively), as well as lateral approximants like (as in ''less''). Terminology Before Peter Ladefoged coined the term "approximant" in the 1960s, the terms "frictionless continuant" and "semivowel" were used to refer to non-lateral approximants. In phonology, "approximant" is also a distinctive feature that encompasses all sonorants except nasals, including vowels, taps and trills. Semivowels Some approximants resemble vowels in acoustic and articulatory properties and the terms ''semivowel'' and ''glide'' are often used for these non-syllabic vowel-like segmen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fricative
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German (the final consonant of ''Bach''); or the side of the tongue against the molars, in the case of Welsh (appearing twice in the name ''Llanelli''). This turbulent airflow is called frication. A particular subset of fricatives are the sibilants. When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a narrow channel, but in addition, the tongue is curled lengthwise to direct the air over the edge of the teeth. English , , , and are examples of sibilants. The usage of two other terms is less standardized: "Spirant" is an older term for fricatives used by some American and European phoneticians and phonologists. "Strident" could mean just "sibilant", but some authors include also labiodental and uvular fricatives in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stop Consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips (, ), or glottis (). Plosives contrast with nasals, where the vocal tract is blocked but airflow continues through the nose, as in and , and with fricatives, where partial occlusion impedes but does not block airflow in the vocal tract. Terminology The terms ''stop, occlusive,'' and ''plosive'' are often used interchangeably. Linguists who distinguish them may not agree on the distinction being made. The terms refer to different features of the consonant. "Stop" refers to the airflow that is stopped. "Occlusive" refers to the articulation, which occludes (blocks) the vocal tract. "Plosive" refers to the release burst (plosion) of the consonant. Some object to the use of "plosive" for inaudibly released stops, which may then instead be ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nasal Consonant
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majority of consonants are oral consonants. Examples of nasals in English are , and , in words such as ''nose'', ''bring'' and ''mouth''. Nasal occlusives are nearly universal in human languages. There are also other kinds of nasal consonants in some languages. Definition Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusives, in which air escapes through the nose but not through the mouth, as it is blocked (occluded) by the lips or tongue. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound. Rarely, non-occlusive consonants may be nasalized. Most nasals are voiced, and in fact, the nasal sounds and are among the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few languages such as Burmese, Welsh, Icelandic and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
