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Mende 〔Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh〕 (''(unicode:Mɛnde yia)'') is a major language of Sierra Leone, with some speakers in neighboring Liberia. It is spoken by the Mende people and by other ethnic groups as a regional lingua franca in southern Sierra Leone. Mende is a tonal language belonging to the Mande branch of the Niger–Congo language family. Early systematic descriptions of Mende were by F. W. Migeod 〔Migeod, F. W. 1908. ''The Mende language''. London〕 and Kenneth Crosby.〔Crosby, Kenneth. 1944. ''An Introduction to the Study of Mende''. Cambridge University Press.〕 ==Written forms== In 1921, Kisimi Kamara invented a syllabary for Mende he called Kikakui (). The script achieved widespread use for a time, but has largely been replaced with an alphabet based on the Latin script, and the Mende script is considered a "failed script".〔Unseth, Peter. 2011. Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization. In ''The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts'', ed. by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, pp. 23-32. New York: Oxford University Press.〕 The Bible was translated into Mende and published in 1959, in Latin script. The Latin-based alphabet is: a, b, d, e, ɛ, f, g, gb, h, i, j, k, kp, l, m, n, ny, o, ɔ, p, s, t, u, v, w, y 〔(Coble, Scott. n.d. "Mende." AboutWorldLanguages.com ) (accessed 8 October 2014)〕 Mende has seven vowels: a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u 〔(A Mende Orthography Workshop: Ministry of Education, Freetown, January 21-25, 1980 )〕〔(Pemagbi, Joe. 1991. "A guide to Mende orthography." SLADEA. )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mende language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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