Not to be confused with Mende language (Papua New Guinea).

Mende
Mɛnde yia Mɛnde yia
Spoken in	Sierra Leone, Liberia
Region	South central Sierra Leone
Native speakers	1,480,000 (2006)
Language family	Niger–Congo ? Mande Western Mande Southwestern Mende–Loma Mende–Bandi Mende–Loko Mende
Writing system	Latin; Kisimi Kamara's Mende syllabary
Language codes
ISO 639-2	`men`
ISO 639-3	`men`

Mende (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 ^[1] and Kenneth Crosby.^[2]

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".^[3] The Bible was translated into Mende and published in 1959, in Latin script.

It was used extensively in the movies Amistad and Blood Diamond.

References [link]

^ Migeod, F. W. 1908. The Mende language. London
^ Crosby, Kenneth. 1944. An Introduction to the Study of Mende. Cambridge University Press.
^ 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.