The Kuranko are an ethnic group inhabiting Sierra Leone and Guinea, they are related to the Mandingo tribe and are a Mande people, It is said that their language is Mutually intelligible with both susu and Manding, how true is this? Can a Manding speaker understand Kuranko? Thank you any information would be much appreciated.
1 Like
Hello!
I donāt specifically know much about the āKurankoā variety. That said, this Wikipedia page says that it is a Manding variety that is similar to Eastern Maninka (the dominant variety of Manding spoken in Guinea, which is often simply referred to as āManinkaā or āMalinkeĢā).
Based on this information, I would that itās unlikely that itās mutually intelligible with Susu. Susu is part of the broader Mande family of which Manding is but one part, but itās not possible to understand for speakers of Manding varieties (i.e., Bambara, Jula, Maninka or Mandinka, etc) unless they grew up around it and/or have learned it.
1 Like
Hello Coleman, great to hear from you!
I did highly doubt the likelihood that kuranko is mutually intelligible with both susu and Manding as they are both highly divergent languages and even with the presence of many loanwords this still wouldnāt facilitate a mutual intelligibility with susu if it is truly a manding language. To my knowledge susu is related/derived from Soninke which diverged from Manding a very long time ago so for Kuranko to be mutually intelligible with both seemed extremely unlikely.
I ni ce!
One thing:
Itās not quite accurate to say that Soninke diverged from Manding. Similarly, I wouldnāt say that Susu derived from Soninke. They are all modern-day spoken languages that occupy different branches within the broader āMandeā language family. When they diverged from the same branch varies, but it goes back quite a while.
You might find this article helpful for your research:
- Vydrin, Valentin. 2009. āOn the Problem of the Proto-Mande Homeland.ā ŠŠ¾ŠæŃŠ¾ŃŃ ŠÆŠ·ŃŠŗŠ¾Š²Š¾Š³Š¾ Š Š¾Š“ŃŃŠ²Š°āJournal of Language Relationship 1: 107ā42.
It includes a tree with rough estimates of when various languages and protolanguages within it may have diverged in terms of years.