Mande languages

Early scholarship

The group was first recognized in 1854 by Sigismund Wilhelm 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. He speaks of a northern group mandé-tan and a southern group mandé-fu. The distinction was basically done only because the languages in the north use the expression tan for ten, and the southern languages use fu. In 1924, Louis Tauxier noted that the distinction is not well founded and there is at least a third subgroup he called mandé-bu. It was not until 1950 that André Prost supported that view and gave further details.

In 1958, Welmers published an article called "The Mande Languages," where he divided the languages into three subgroups: North-West, South and East. His conclusion was based on lexicostatistic research. Joseph Greenberg followed that distinction in his The Languages of Africa (1963). Long (1971) and Gérard Galtier (1980) follow the distinction into three groups but with notable differences.

Classification

Relation to Niger-Congo

Mande does not share the morphology characteristic of most of the Niger–Congo family, such as the noun-class system. Accordingly, Dimmendaal (2008) argues that the evidence for inclusion is slim, and that for now Mande is best considered an independent family. The same view is held by Güldemann (2018).

Without definitively concluding that Mande is or is not a member of Niger–Congo, Vydrin (2016) notes that proto-Mande basic vocabulary fits relatively well with Niger–Congo, and that typological criteria such as the absence of a noun-class system should not be taken as probative; he notes that "If the position of Mande within Niger-Congo is confirmed... Mande will certainly represent the most ancient branching of the phylum". Blench regards it as an early branch that diverged before the noun-class morphology developed. Dwyer (1998) compared it with other branches of Niger–Congo and finds that they form a coherent family, with Mande being the most divergent of the branches he considered. A preliminary study from 2024 suggests that a relationship between the Mande and Atlantic-Congo branches is plausible based on reconstructed lexical items.

Pozdniakov and Vydrin (2026) identified 180 cognates between Proto-Mande and Proto-Bantu, ranked by reliability, alongside 27 additional Proto-Mande roots with cognates in other Niger-Congo families. Furthermore, the authors tentatively established regular sound correspondences for Proto-Mande and Proto-Bantu initial consonants, while advancing systematic arguments supporting a genealogical relationship between Mande and Bantu:

• In the basic vocabulary, the average cognacy rate of contemporary Mande languages with Proto-Bantu is higher than the rate for other families whose membership in the Niger-Congo macrofamily is uncontested.

• In the basic vocabulary, the number of phonetic similarities actually observed far exceeds the number expected on the basis of random coincidence alone.

• In the basic vocabulary, Proto-Bantu and Proto-Mande are considerably closer to each other than contemporary Bantu and Mande languages are.

• Phonetic correspondences between Proto-Bantu and Proto-Mande are not only regular, but also proportional, which excludes the possibility that they are merely fortuitous.

• In the basic vocabulary, the distribution of roots by their stability in the Mande family displays a strong positive correlation with their distribution in the other Niger-Congo families.

Internal classification

The diversity and depth of the Mande family is comparable to that of Indo-European. Eleven low-level branches of Mande are nearly universally accepted: Southern Mande (Dan etc.), Eastern Mande (Bisa, Boko etc.), Samogo, Bobo, Soninke–Bozo, Southwestern Mande (Mende, Kpelle, Loma etc.), Soso–Jalonke, Jogo, Vai–Kono, Mokole and Manding (Bambara, Djula etc.). It is also widely accepted that these form two primary branches, the first two as Southeastern Mande and the rest as Western Mande.

Most internal Mande classifications are based on lexicostatistics, for example, that based on the Swadesh list. An alternative classification from Kastenholz (1996) is based on lexical innovations and comparative linguistics. Kastenholz warns however that this is not based on objective criteria and thus is not a genealogical classification in the narrow sense. The following classification is a compilation of both.

• Mande
  • Southeast Mande
    • Southern Mande (Dan, Mah, etc.)
    • Eastern Mande (Bisa, Busa, etc.)
  • West Mande
    • Central West (Manding–Kpelle)
      • Central Mande
        • Jogo languages
        • Great Manding
          • Vai-Mokole
            • • Vai–Kono
              • Mokole languages
          • Manding languages
      • Southwestern-Susu
        • Southwest Mande (Mende, Kpelle, etc.)
        • Susu–Yalunka
    • Northwest (Samogo–Soninke)
      • Northwest proper
        • Samogo languages
        • Bɔbɔ
        • Soninke–Bozo

Morphosyntactic features

Mande languages do not have the noun-class system or verbal extensions of the Atlantic–Congo languages and for which the Bantu languages are so famous, but Bobo has causative and intransitive forms of the verb. Southwestern Mande languages and Soninke have initial consonant mutation. Plurality is most often marked with a clitic; in some languages, with tone, as for example in Sembla. Pronouns often have alienable–inalienable and inclusive–exclusive distinctions. Word order in transitive clauses is subject–auxiliary–object–verb–adverb. Mainly postpositions are used. Within noun phrases, possessives come before the noun, and adjectives and plural markers after the verb; demonstratives are found with both orders.

Comparative vocabulary

Below is a sample basic vocabulary of reconstructed proto-forms:

Below are some cognates from D. J. Dwyer (1988) (⟨j⟩ is or ):

Note that in these cognates:

• 'saliva' = 'mouth'+'water'
• 'milk' = 'breast'+'water'
• 'buck (he-goat)' = 'goat'+'male'
• 'ram' = 'sheep'+'male'

Numerals

Comparison of numerals in individual languages:

Proto-language

Proto-Mande is the reconstructed hypothetical ancestor of all the modern Mande languages, which number over 60. The reconstruction of Proto-Mande is an ongoing effort, and it has not yet reached the same level of comparative depth as some other proto-languages, such as Proto-Bantu. The time depth of the Mande family is estimated to be 5,300 to 5,500 years.

The following is a recently proposed tentative consonant system:

1. /ɓ/ and /ɗ/ are realized as [m] and [n] before nasal vowels.
2. /j/ and /w/ are realized as [ɲ] and [ŋ] before vowels.

Proto-Mande had a consonant inventory that included stops, implosives, fricatives, and approximants. It likely lacked phonemic nasal consonants, instead having them as allophones of other sounds. The phonetic nasals [m] and [n] are analyzed as allophones of the implosives /ɓ/ and /ɗ/, while [ɲ] and [ŋ] were allophones of the approximants /j/ and /w/. These nasal allophones occurred when positioned next to nasalized vowels.

Nasals are broadly phonemic in modern Mande languages, but they tend to be allophonic in the Southern group; Vydrin argues this system is preserved from Proto-Mande. The proto-language's lack of phonemic nasal stops helps explain the absence or rarity of combinations of nasals with semi-closed vowels (e.g., *me, *ne, *ɲe, *mo, *no, *ɲo) in many Western Mande languages.

Below are the ancestral vowels, adapted from a reconstruction by Vydrin:

Proto-Mande had 9 oral vowels, 5 nasal vowels, and a syllabic nasal, marked in the data as *N. Vowel length was likely contrastive as well. Proto-Mande, like its descendants, was certainly tonal, with a system that included two tones. Many modern languages have developed more than two tones, particularly the Southern Mande languages.

For a preliminary list of reconstructed lexical items, see List of Proto-Mande reconstructions.

Since 2024, Valentin Vydrin's Comparative lexical database of Mande languages is available on line (Vydrin 2026).