Tags: Language.
Mende /ˈmɛndi/ (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 and Kenneth Crosby.In 1921 Kisimi Kamara invented a syllabary for Mende he called Kikakui (Kikaku).
