N’Ko

N'Ko (also known as Manding) is a language spoken in West Africa. It is a member of the Manding family of languages, which includes Mandinka, Bambara, and Maninka. N'Ko is spoken by the Mandingo people, who are spread across Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal, and Gambia. The language is used in education, literature, and media. N'Ko was created in 1949 by Solomana Kante, a native speaker of Mandinka. Kante wanted to create a written form of the language that would be accessible to all Mandingo people. He based the N'Ko alphabet on the Latin alphabet, and he also devised a system of writing numbers and tones. N'Ko has been used as a literary language since the 1950s. It is also used in education, media, and government. N'Ko is a tonal language, which means that the meaning of a word can change depending on the pitch of the speaker's voice. There are four tones in N'Ko: high, low, rising, and falling. The tones are indicated with accent marks above or below the letters. N'Ko is written from left to right, and it uses the Latin alphabet. The language has 26 letters, which are all pronounced the same way as in English. There are no silent letters. N'Ko is a fairly simple language grammatically. There are no gender distinctions, and there are only two tenses: present and past. There is no future tense. The language has a subject-verb-object word order. N'Ko is spoken by about 4 million people in West Africa. It is an official language of Guinea, and it is also spoken in Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal, and Gambia.