Loma (Loghoma, Looma, Lorma) is a
Mande language spoken by the
Loma people
The Loma people, sometimes called Loghoma, Looma, Lorma or Toma, are a West African ethnic group living primarily in mountainous, sparsely populated regions near the border between Guinea and Liberia. Their population was estimated at 330,000 ...
of
Liberia and
Guinea.
Dialects of Loma proper in Liberia are Gizima, Wubomei, Ziema, Bunde, Buluyiema. The dialect of Guinea, Toma (Toa, Toale, Toali, or , the
Malinke
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 peop ...
name for ''Loma''), is an official regional language.
In Liberia, the people and language are also known as "Bouze" (Busy, Buzi), which is considered offensive.
Writing systems
Today, Loma uses a Latin-based
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
which is written from left to right. A
syllabary saw limited use in the 1930s and 1940s in correspondence between Loma-speakers, but today has fallen into disuse.
Sample
The
Lord's Prayer
The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father or Pater Noster, is a central Christian prayer which Jesus taught as the way to pray. Two versions of this prayer are recorded in the gospels: a longer form within the Sermon on the Mount in the Gosp ...
in Loma:
[Matthew 6:9-13 in ''Deʋe niinɛ'' ew Testament in Loma ]Monrovia
Monrovia () is the capital city of the West African country of Liberia. Founded in 1822, it is located on Cape Mesurado on the Atlantic coast and as of the 2008 census had 1,010,970 residents, home to 29% of Liberia’s total population. As th ...
: Bible Society in Liberia, 1971. This excerpt was visible at http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-loma.html, see archived version at https://web.archive.org/web/20160306074512/http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-loma.html.
Hymns
In the 1960s several hymns composed in Loma by
Billema Kwillia were recorded by the missionary Margaret D. Miller and then adopted by the Lutheran Church, first appearing in print in Loma in 1970.
[C. MICHAEL HAWN/S T KIMBROUGH, JR. (with appreciation for information provided by Daniel W. Sopo). "Billema Kwillia." ''The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology.'' Canterbury Press, accessed February 24, 2021, http://www.hymnology.co.uk/b/billema-kwillia.] The most widely used, 'A va de laa' was not translated to singable English until 2004; it is also translated to German.
References
Bibliography
* Rude, Noel. 1983. Ergativity and the active-stative typology in Loma. ''Studies in African Linguistics'', 14:265–28
* Sadler, Wesley. 1951. ''Untangled Loma: a course of study of the Looma language of the Western Province, Liberia, West Africa.'' Published by Board of Foreign Missions of the United Lutheran Church in America for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Liberia.
External links
ISO proposal for Looma 'macrolanguage'
Mande languages
Languages of Liberia
Languages of Guinea
Languages written in Latin script
{{Mande-lang-stub