World Language Map

Where is Mende (Sierra Leone) spoken?

Mende (Sierra Leone) is a Mande language, spoken in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. The outlined area on the map shows where.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Mende (Sierra Leone) is spoken

Mende (Sierra Leone) is spoken in 3 countries: Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Sierra Leone27%2,462,684
Liberia1.7%92,433
GuineaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Mende (Sierra Leone) is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Mende (Sierra Leone).

How many people speak Mende (Sierra Leone)?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language. The table above has rough per-country estimates from Unicode CLDR.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Mende (Sierra Leone) sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Mende (Sierra Leone) as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Mande
  2. Western Mande
  3. Manding-Kpelle
  4. Southwest Mande
  5. Mende-Loma
  6. Mende-Bandi
  7. Mende-Loko
  8. Mende (Sierra Leone)

Related languages

Other languages in the Mende-Loko group:

More about Mende (Sierra Leone)

Codes: ISO 639-3 men, Glottolog mend1266. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Mende (Sierra Leone)

Where is Mende (Sierra Leone) spoken?

Mende (Sierra Leone) is spoken in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Unicode CLDR puts it at 27% of the population of Sierra Leone, which is about 2,462,684 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Mende (Sierra Leone) in?

Glottolog places Mende (Sierra Leone) in the Mande family, in the branch Western Mande, Manding-Kpelle, Southwest Mande, Mende-Loma, Mende-Bandi and Mende-Loko.

Embed this map

Copy this code into your web page. It is free to use. Please keep the link under the map, as it is how people find where the map comes from.