Mandinka & Maninka Alphabet (Mandingo)

Mandingo is the old English name, and the international language code man, for a chain of closely related Manding languages of West Africa. Two of them carry most of its speakers: Maninka (Malinké), spoken in Upper Guinea around Kankan and called Maninkakan by its speakers, and Mandinka, spoken along the River Gambia and in southern Senegal. Today speakers and searchers alike mostly say Mandinka or Maninka, and the page uses those names.

Unicode's CLDR has no alphabet of its own for Mandingo, because the two countries write it differently. Guinea uses the same West African letters as Bambara and Dyula, with open vowels written Ɛ ɛ and Ɔ ɔ and the ny sound written Ɲ ɲ. The Gambia, where English is the official language, writes Mandinka with only five vowel letters, spells the ny sound Ñ ñ, as in Spanish, and shares Ŋ ŋ with Guinea. The grid puts both side by side, row by row, so each added letter stands next to the plain letter it belongs to.

The Mandinka alphabet and what ŋ, ñ, ɛ, ɔ and ɲ do

The plain letters are read the same way every time. C is the ch of church, j is the j of jam, g is always hard, and a long vowel is written twice, as in naani (four) and luulu (five). In Gambian Mandinka a noun usually ends in -o when it means 'the', which is why so many Mandinka words end that way.

Ŋ ŋ, called eng, is the ng of English sing as one sound. It is very common in Mandinka, often at the end of a word: kiliŋ is one and taŋ is ten. Ñ ñ in Gambian spelling and Ɲ ɲ in Guinean spelling are the same sound, the ny of canyon, as in the Gambian afternoon greeting I tiiñaŋ. On a phone without these letters people write ng and ny instead; that is understood in a chat, but in a book, a sign or a name the real letters are the standard.

Maninka in Guinea has seven vowels. Ɛ ɛ, the open e, is close to the vowel of English bed, and plain e is the closed é of French; Ɔ ɔ, the open o, is close to the vowel of British law, while plain o is the closed ô of French; sɔɔma (morning) is written with open ɔ. Both languages are tonal, but everyday spelling leaves tone unmarked. Mind the look-alikes: ŋ is not the Greek eta η, Ɛ is not the Greek epsilon ε, Ɔ is not the reversed c ↄ, and Ɲ ɲ has its hook on the left, unlike the phonetic ɳ.

How to type ŋ, ñ, ɛ, ɔ and ɲ on a keyboard

Ñ ñ is the easy one. On Windows hold Alt and type 0241 on the number pad for ñ or 0209 for Ñ; on the US-International layout press AltGr+N. On a Mac press Option+N, then N. On an iPhone or Android phone, long-press n on the keyboard and pick ñ.

The others are not on any standard English or French keyboard. In Microsoft Word on Windows, type the code and press Alt+X: 014B gives ŋ, 014A Ŋ, 025B ɛ, 0190 Ɛ, 0254 ɔ, 0186 Ɔ, 0272 ɲ and 019D Ɲ. To type them in every program, install a free keyboard layout for Mandinka, Maninka or the Manding languages, for example through Keyman, which also has phone keyboards. On a Mac, switch to the Unicode Hex Input layout and hold Option while typing the same four-digit codes.

In HTML, write ŋ or ŋ for ŋ, Ŋ or Ŋ for Ŋ, ñ for ñ, ɛ for ɛ, ɔ for ɔ and ɲ for ɲ. System fonts show them all; decorative fonts often lack the capitals Ŋ and Ɲ, so check before you print.

Quotation marks and money in Guinea and The Gambia

Printed text follows the typography of each country's official language. In Guinea, where French is official, a Maninka quotation sits in guillemets: « I ni sɔɔma ». In The Gambia, where English is official, Mandinka is quoted with curly quotes: “Abaraka”.

CLDR uses FG for the Guinean franc and D for the dalasi; these are ordinary letters rather than dedicated currency-sign characters. Guinea writes FG or GNF after the amount, and The Gambia writes D before it, as in D50, so the grid has no dedicated currency glyph.

Where Mandinka and Maninka are spoken

Unicode's CLDR estimates about 4 million Mandingo speakers in all: about 3.2 million in Guinea 🇬🇳, mostly Maninka of Upper Guinea, and about 700,000 in The Gambia 🇬🇲, where Mandinka is the largest language of the country. Mandinka is also spoken in the Casamance of Senegal 🇸🇳 and in Guinea-Bissau 🇬🇼, and Maninka reaches into Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Liberia; all of these are estimates.

The Manding languages share their roots with the Mali Empire of Sunjata Keita, whose story the jali (in Maninka jeli), the hereditary singers and historians, still tell to the kora. Bambara of Mali and Dyula of Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire are close enough that speakers follow much of each other's speech, and each has its own collection here. Maninka is also widely written in N’Ko, the right-to-left script the Guinean scholar Solomana Kanté created in 1949; the Mandingo (N’Ko) and N’Ko collections have those letters. Neighbouring languages with their own pages include Fula, Susu and Wolof, and the Guinea and Gambia collections gather each country's flag and emoji.