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Mandingo Language
The Mandinka language (; Ajami script, Ajami: ) or Mandingo, is a Mande languages, Mande language spoken by the Mandinka people of Guinea, northern Guinea-Bissau, the Casamance region of Senegal, and in The Gambia where it is one of the principal languages. Mandinka belongs to the Manding languages, Manding branch of Mande and is thus similar to Bambara language, Bambara and Maninka language, Maninka/Malinké but with only 5 instead of 7 vowels. In a majority of areas, it is a tonal language with two tones: low and high, although the particular variety spoken in the Gambia and Senegal borders on a pitch accent due to its proximity with non-tonal neighboring languages like Wolof language, Wolof. Phonology Mandinka is here represented by the variety spoken in Casamance. There is little dialectical diversity. Tone Mandinka has two tones, high and low. Unmodified nouns are either high tone on all syllables or low tone on all syllables. The definite suffix ''-o'' takes a low ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Senegal
Senegal,; Wolof: ''Senegaal''; Pulaar: 𞤅𞤫𞤲𞤫𞤺𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭 (Senegaali); Arabic: السنغال ''As-Sinighal'') officially the Republic of Senegal,; Wolof: ''Réewum Senegaal''; Pulaar : 𞤈𞤫𞤲𞤣𞤢𞥄𞤲𞤣𞤭 𞤅𞤫𞤲𞤫𞤺𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭 (Renndaandi Senegaali); Arabic: جمهورية السنغال ''Jumhuriat As-Sinighal'') is a country in West Africa, on the Atlantic Ocean coastline. Senegal is bordered by Mauritania to the north, Mali to the east, Guinea to the southeast and Guinea-Bissau to the southwest. Senegal nearly surrounds the Gambia, a country occupying a narrow sliver of land along the banks of the Gambia River, which separates Senegal's southern region of Casamance from the rest of the country. Senegal also shares a maritime border with Cape Verde. Senegal's economic and political capital is Dakar. Senegal is notably the westernmost country in the mainland of the Old World, or Afro-Eurasia. It owes its name to the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tonal Language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with ''phoneme''. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Mechanics Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey ... [...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] |
Glottal Consonant
Glottal consonants are consonants using the glottis as their primary articulation. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the glottal fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have, while some do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, glottal consonants behave as typical consonants in many languages. For example, in Literary Arabic, most words are formed from a root ''C-C-C'' consisting of three consonants, which are inserted into templates such as or . The glottal consonants and can occupy any of the three root consonant slots, just like "normal" consonants such as or . The glottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet are as follows: Characteristics In many languages, the "fricatives" are not true fricatives. This is a historical usage of the word. They instead represent transitional states of the glottis ( phonation) without a specific place of articulation, and may behave as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Velar Consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive and the movements of the dorsum are not very precise, velars easily undergo assimilation, shifting their articulation back or to the front depending on the quality of adjacent vowels. They often become automatically ''fronted'', that is partly or completely palatal before a following front vowel, and ''retracted'', that is partly or completely uvular before back vowels. Palatalised velars (like English in ''keen'' or ''cube'') are sometimes referred to as palatovelars. Many languages also have labialized velars, such as , in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also labial–velar consonants, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as . This distinction disappears with the approx ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palatal Consonant
Palatals are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex. Characteristics The most common type of palatal consonant is the extremely common approximant , which ranks as among the ten most common sounds in the world's languages. The nasal is also common, occurring in around 35 percent of the world's languages, in most of which its equivalent obstruent is not the stop , but the affricate . Only a few languages in northern Eurasia, the Americas and central Africa contrast palatal stops with postalveolar affricates—as in Hungarian, Czech, Latvian, Macedonian, Slovak, Turkish and Albanian. Consonants with other primary articulations may be palatalized, that is, accompanied by the raising of the tongue surface towards the hard palate. For example, English (spelled ''sh'') has such a palatal component ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alveolar Consonant
Alveolar (; UK also ) consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with the tip of the tongue (the apical consonants), as in English, or with the flat of the tongue just above the tip (the "blade" of the tongue; called laminal consonants), as in French and Spanish. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) does not have separate symbols for the alveolar consonants. Rather, the same symbol is used for all coronal places of articulation that are not palatalized like English palato-alveolar ''sh'', or retroflex. To disambiguate, the ''bridge'' (, ''etc.'') may be used for a dental consonant, or the under-bar (, ''etc.'') may be used for the postalveolars. differs from dental in that the former is a sibilant and the latter is not. differs from postalveolar in being unpalatalized. The bare letters , etc. ... [...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] |
Nasal Vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization. Nasalized vowels are vowels under the influence of neighbouring sounds. For instance, the [] of the word ''hand'' is affected by the following nasal consonant. In most languages, vowels adjacent to nasal consonants are produced partially or fully with a lowered velum in a natural process of assimilation and are therefore technically nasal, but few speakers would notice. That is the case in English: vowels preceding nasal consonants are nasalized, but there is no phonemic distinction between nasal and oral vowels, and all vowels are considered phonemically oral. The nasality of nasal vowels, however, is a distinctive feature of certain languages. In other words, a language may contrast oral vowels and nasalized vowels ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Susu Language
The Susu language (endonym: sus, Sosoxui; french: Soussou) is the language of the Susu or ''Soso'' people of Guinea and Sierra Leone, West Africa, West Africa. It is in the Mande language family. It is one of the national languages of Guinea and spoken mainly in the coastal region of the country. History The language was also used by people in the coastal regions of Guinea and Sierra Leone as a trade language. The first literature in Susu was a translation of the first seven chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, translated by John Godfrey Wilhelm of the Church Mission Society The Church Mission Society (CMS), formerly known as the Church Missionary Society, is a British mission society working with the Christians around the world. Founded in 1799, CMS has attracted over nine thousand men and women to serve as mission .... This was published in London as "Lingjili Matthew" in 1816. J.G. Wilhelm translated a considerable portion of the New Testament, but only this small part ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mali Empire
The Mali Empire ( Manding: ''Mandé''Ki-Zerbo, Joseph: ''UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. IV, Abridged Edition: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century'', p. 57. University of California Press, 1997. or Manden; ar, مالي, Mālī) was an empire in West Africa from 1226 to 1670. The empire was founded by Sundiata Keita (c. 1214 – c. 1255) and became renowned for the wealth of its rulers, especially Mansa Musa (Musa Keita). The Manding languages were spoken in the empire. At its peak, Mali was the largest empire in West Africa, widely influencing the culture of the region through the spread of its language, laws and customs. Much of the recorded information about the Mali Empire comes from 14th-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun, 14th-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta and 16th-century Andalusian traveller Leo Africanus. The other major source of information is Mandinka oral tradition, as recorded by storytellers known as griots. The empire began as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jola Languages
Jola (Joola) or Diola is a dialect continuum spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. It belongs to the Bak branch of the Niger–Congo language family. Name The name ''Jola'' is an exonym, and may be from the Mandinka word ''joolaa'' 'one who pays back'.Wilson, William André Auquier. 2007. ''Guinea Languages of the Atlantic group: description and internal classification''. (Schriften zur Afrikanistik, 12.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. There is no widespread endonym used by all of the Jola speakers. Languages The primary branches of Jola proper and to some extent Central Jola are not mutually intelligible. The main varieties are: * Bayot *Jola proper ** Kwatay (Kuwaataay), spoken along the coast south of the Casamance River. ** Karon–Mlomp *** Karon, spoken along the coast of Casamance south of Diouloulou. *** Mlomp **Central Jola *** Jola-Fonyi (Kujamatay), spoken around Bignona. The official standard. *** Bandial, spoken in a small area south of the Casa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
