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 in ...
of
Liberia
Liberia, officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to Guinea–Liberia border, its north, Ivory Coast to Ivory Coast–Lib ...
and
Guinea
Guinea, officially the Republic of Guinea, 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, Côte d'Ivoire to the southeast, and Sier ...
.
Dialects of Loma proper in Liberia are Gizima, Wubomei, Ziema, Bunde, Buluyiema. The dialect of Guinea, Toma (Toa, Toale, Toali, or , the
Malinke 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 standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
which is written from left to right. A
syllabary
In the Linguistics, linguistic study of Written language, written languages, a syllabary is a set of grapheme, written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) mora (linguistics), morae which make up words.
A symbol in a syllaba ...
saw limited use in the 1930s and 1940s in correspondence between Loma-speakers, but today has fallen into disuse.
Phonology
Loma has 21 consonants, 28 vowels, and 2 tones.
Every vowel has 4 forms: Short and non-nasalized, Short and nasalized, Long and non-nasalized, and Long and nasalized making a total of 28 vowels.
Loma has 2 tones:
the High Tone () and
the Low Tone () .
Sample
The
Lord's Prayer
The Lord's Prayer, also known by its incipit Our Father (, ), is a central Christian prayer attributed to Jesus. It contains petitions to God focused on God’s holiness, will, and kingdom, as well as human needs, with variations across manusc ...
in Loma:
[Matthew 6:9-13 in ''Deʋe niinɛ'' ew Testament in Loma ]Monrovia
Monrovia () is the administrative capital city, capital and largest city of Liberia. Founded in 1822, it is located on Cape Mesurado on the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic coast and as of the 2022 census had 1,761,032 residents, home to 33.5% of Liber ...
: 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