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Mende, Bandi, and Loko belong to the southwestern group of Mande. (Webbook)
Ethnologue lists the classification as: Niger-Congo, Mande, Western, Central-Southwestern, Southwestern, Mende-Loma, Mende-Bandi, Mende-Loko
Although Mende is in the Mande branch of Niger-Congo the name is a separate term from Mande (see also Manding).
Mende, Bandi, and Loko are spoken in Sierra Leone/Liberia, northeastern Liberia, and north-central Sierra Leone, respectively. (Webbook)
Apparently some speakers of Bandi were (are?) located in Guinea as refugees.
According to to information compiled from Ethnologue:
No thorough dialect survey has come to our attention. Dwyer reports that Mende, Bandi, and Loko "stand on the dividing line between being distinct languages and being dialects." (Webbook)
According to information compiled from Ethnologue:
Mende is a regional lingua franca and first language in southern Sierra Leone; it is one of the four major languages of Sierra Leone. Bandi and Loko are local first languages. (Webbook)
In Bandi, the Tahamba dialect is used for literature. (Ethnologue)
Mende is written in a Latin-based alphabet, with extended characters. The exact current status of the orthography needs to be clarified.
The Mende KiKaKui script is apparently still used by a small number of people. It is not yet encoded in Unicode.
Alphabets as reported by Hartell (1993) and presented in Systèmes alphabétiques:
A sample Mende text is shown on the "Language Museum" site: http://www.language-museum.com/m/mende.htm
Unicode fonts with extended Latin ranges would be necessary.
Dunya Lahi Nuvuu Lɔnyisia Va (Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Mende): http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/mfy.htm
Not aware of any.
Mende
Bandi
Loko
Chanard, Christian (2006), Systèmes alphabétiques des langues africaines, LLACAN, CNRS, http://sumale.vjf.cnrs.fr/phono/
Dwyer, David (1997), Webbook of African Languages, http://www.isp.msu.edu/AfrLang/hiermenu.html (page on "Mende/Bandi/Loko," http://www.isp.msu.edu/AfrLang/Mende_root.html )
Hartell, Rhonda L., ed. (1993), The Alphabets of Africa. Dakar: UNESCO and SIL. (The French edition, published the same year, is entitled Alphabets de Langues Africaines).
SIL International, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, "Bandi," http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=bza
______, "Loko," http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lok
______, "Mende," http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=men
SIL International, "ISO 639 Code Tables," http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp
U.S. Library of Congress, "ISO 639.2: Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages: Alpha-3 codes arranged alphabetically by the English name of language," http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php
Wikipedia, "Mende language," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mende_language
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