Welcome to the very own web site of all Mandinka speakers.
www. mandinka.org.
gathers Mandinka speakers from all four corners of the world to read the news, exchange the ideas and share the information. Many people have left Africa in order to find greener pastures in terms of work or education. Our aim is to encourage these people to store and produce the text in their own language so, that their families in home land may also see the fruits of development.
The main pages are written only in Mandinka, but some information of following subjects is given in few European languages as well:
1. Where are the Mandinkas living ?
2. What can you read in Mandinka?
3. Download the Mandinka fonts
4. Short introduction to the written Mandinka
5. Developing the web pages together
6. Contact us
1. Where are the Mandinkas living ?
There are more than 1.000.000 Mandinkas in West-Africa. More than 600.000 of them are in The Gambia, more than 300.000 in Senegal and almost 200.000 in Guinea-Bissau.
In The Gambia the Mandinkas are the biggest people group. 45 % of the Gambians speak Mandinka as their first language and additional 25 % as their second language.
Many Mandinkas have moved overseas. Today there are several thousands of Mandinkas in USA as well as in many European countries.
2. What can one read in Mandinka?
A number of magazines, novels and folk stories are written in Mandinka. There are also books about health care, farming and religion. The biggest work until this has been the translation of New Testament in Mandinka, which was published in 1989.
Until this most of the writing is co-ordinated by NGO’s, like WEC International. Fortunately today many people are taking initiative and producing the text in their mother tongue. These web sites are published just in order to support this development.
3. Download the Mandinka-fonts
There are some special characters in Mandinka language. The first thing to do is to take them in use in your own computer. You can do this according the following instructions:
Download the Mandinka font-files to your computer to any folder you want:
When the down-loading is ready, transfer the font-files to following folders:
For Windows 95/98/ME/XP the folder is C:/WINDOWS/FONTS,
for NT 4.0/Windows 2000 the folder is C:/WINNT/FONTS.
4. Short introduction to the written Mandinka
To write Mandinka is relatively easy, because Mandinka is a phonetic language. It means that the letters sound the same in any position. However, this is true for individual words, but in word fusions certain changes take place:
Example 1.
Say it to him = “A fo a ye”, it sounds like ”a faa ye”
It is essential to put the stress on right syllables when speaking, although it is not normally marked in written language. However, the meaning is normally clear because of the context.
Example 2.
Wuloo te wuloo kono = The dog is not in the bush (wuloo=dog: the stress is on second syllable, wuloo=bush, the stress is on first syllable)
However, the stress is marked in order to make distinction between I/we and you(singular)/they. The low stress mark ( ` ) is on the word, which have a meaning of several persons.
Example 3.
They won’t come to your place = Ì te naa la i yaa.
The special characters of Mandinka are shown in the picture.
5. Developing the web pages together
At the moment the development and the costs of these web pages are on the responsibility of WEC International – Mandinka Literacy Department. See our home site www.wec.gm.
Most of the first writers are either participants or facilitators of WEC Adult Literacy Classes. We wish to welcome the Mandinkas and those who know the language from any part of the world, to come along to develop these sites.
We offer the space to other groups, societes and even companies. In that case the costs will be shared as discussed further on.
6. Contact us
Please send your regards, opinions and texts to our webmaster, address mandinka@mandinka.org.
Our postal adress is
Mandinka.org
WEC/Jouni Jaakkola
P.O.Box 86
Banjul
The Gambia – West-Africa