Mande

Mande is a family of sixty to seventy-five languages spoken by the Mandé peoples across West Africa. Linguistic reconstruction places the Mande homeland in the southern Sahara, in what is now Mauritania, around 4000 BC; the stone settlements of Dhar Tichitt there are linked to ancestral Mande societies.

Soninke speakers founded the Ghana Empire, or Wagadu, which rose in about 200 and collapsed in the twelfth century, and the Soninke were among the first West Africans to adopt Islam, in about the tenth century. The Manding branch later carried the languages of the Mali and Songhai worlds, with Jula serving merchants on the trans-Saharan trade routes.

Mande has a strong oral tradition, and from the spread of Islam its languages were also written in an adapted Arabic script known as Ajami.