Mano Language Alphabet (Maa)

Mano is a Mande language of the forest country where Liberia, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire meet. Its speakers call themselves Maa; in English the people and the language are called Mano, and in Guinea, where French is the official language, they are usually written Manon. The ISO 639-3 code of the language is mev.

Mano is written in the Latin alphabet, but A–Z is not quite enough for it. Like its neighbours Dan and Kpelle, it has more vowel sounds than Latin has letters, and it fills the gap with letters taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet: Ɛ ɛ for an open e and Ɔ ɔ for an open o. Among the consonants it has the implosive Ɓ ɓ, and the double consonants kp and gb, made at the lips and the back of the mouth at the same moment, which are written as pairs of ordinary letters, as everywhere in the region.

Unicode's CLDR has no official Mano alphabet, and Mano has been written by Bible translators, literacy workers and linguists in Liberia and Guinea without one fixed spelling. The grid on this page highlights Ɛ ɛ, Ɔ ɔ and Ɓ ɓ, which are used in some Mano spellings; when you copy a word, follow the spelling of the text it comes from.

What ɛ, ɔ and ɓ do in Mano

The grid sets the vowels out like a vowel chart: front vowels i, e, ɛ on the left, rounded back vowels u, o, ɔ on the right, a at the bottom. Plain e and o are close-mid vowels, like French é and the o of French beau. ɛ is lower and more open, close to the vowel of English bed, and ɔ is the open o of British law. Mano tells words apart by these differences, so e and ɛ, or o and ɔ, are as different as two letters can be.

ɓ, b with a hook, is an implosive b: the larynx lowers while the lips close, changing the pressure inside the mouth. Mano, like other Mande languages, also has nasal vowels, said partly through the nose.

These letters have look-alikes that are different characters. Ɛ is not the Greek epsilon ε or the reversed 3, Ɔ is not the reversed c ↄ, and ɓ is not a b with an apostrophe. They look nearly the same on screen, but a search engine or a spell checker treats them as different, so copy the real letters from the grid.

Tones in Mano and how they are marked

Mano is a tonal language: the pitch of a syllable can change the meaning of a word. Linguistic descriptions distinguish three level tones—low, mid and high—though some everyday spellings leave tone unmarked.

A published Mano–French dictionary marks low, mid and high tones with grave, macron and acute accents, respectively: à ā á, ɛ̀ ɛ̄ ɛ́ and ɔ̀ ɔ̄ ɔ́. These are combining characters: type or paste the vowel first and the mark straight after it, and the two display as an accented vowel on screen.

How to type ɛ, ɔ and ɓ for Mano

On Windows, in Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 025B for ɛ, 0190 for Ɛ, 0254 for ɔ, 0186 for Ɔ, 0253 for ɓ and 0181 for Ɓ. For Mano tones, type the vowel, then 0300, 0304 or 0301 and Alt+X. On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input keyboard in System Settings, hold Option and type the same four-digit codes.

For regular writing, a keyboard layout for West African Latin letters, such as the free ones made with Keyman, puts ɛ, ɔ and ɓ a key or two away on a computer or a phone. On a phone without one, copy the letters from this page and save them as text replacements. In HTML, write ɛ for ɛ, ɔ for ɔ and ɓ for ɓ.

Where Mano is spoken: Nimba County and Guinée forestière

Unicode's CLDR estimates about 390,000 Mano speakers in Liberia 🇱🇷, in Nimba County in the north-east, around the county capital Sanniquellie and the market town of Ganta. The Mano country continues across the border into the forest region of Guinea 🇬🇳, around Lola and Nzérékoré; CLDR gives no figure for Guinea. Above both rises the Nimba range ⛰️, whose Liberian slopes were mined for iron ore around Yekepa.

Mano belongs to the southern branch of the Mande family, and its closest relative is Dan, which Liberians call Gio; Gio and Mano people live side by side in Nimba County, and the two are often named together. Kpelle, the largest African language of Liberia, is a more distant Mande relative. English is the official language of Liberia and French of Guinea, so Mano texts sit beside English quotes “ ” in Liberia and French guillemets « » in Guinea. The Liberian dollar is written with the ordinary $, as L$ or LD$; the Guinean franc uses the local sign FG; GNF is its ISO code.

For the flag, money and emoji of each country see the Liberia and Guinea collections, and for the neighbours' letters the Dan, Kpelle, Bassa, Grebo and Liberian English pages. Mano carving, above all the masks 🎭 of the Poro society, is famous far beyond Nimba.