Mono language (Congo)

Mono
Native to	Democratic Republic of the Congo
Region	Northwestern corner of Congo (DRC)
Native speakers	unknown (65,000 cited 1984 census)[1]
Language family	Ubangian Banda Central Banda Mid-Southern Mono
Language codes
ISO 639-3	mnh
Glottolog	mono1270[2]

Mono is a language spoken by about 65,000 people^[3] in the northwestern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is one of the Banda languages, a subbranch of the Ubangian branch of the Niger–Congo languages. It has five dialects: Bili, Bubanda, Mpaka, Galaba, and Kaga.

Mono has 33 consonant phonemes, including three labial-velar stops (/k͡p/, /ɡ͡b/, and prenasalized /ᵑ͡ᵐɡ͡b/), an asymmetrical eight-vowel system, and a labiodental flap /ⱱ/ (allophonically a bilabial flap [ⱳ]) that contrasts with both /v/ and /w/. It is a tonal language.

References

1. Mono at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Mono (Democratic Republic of Congo)". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
3. Ethnologue report for Mono

• Kamanda-Kola, Roger. 2003. Phonologie et morpho-syntaxe du mono: Langue oubanguienne du Congo R.D. (LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics 60). Munich: LINCOM EUROPA.
• Olson, Kenneth S. (2004), "Mono" (PDF), Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34 (02): 233–238, doi:10.1017/S0025100304001744
• Olson, Kenneth S. 2005. The phonology of Mono (SIL International and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics 140). Dallas: SIL & UTA.
• Olson, Kenneth S. & Brian E. Schrag. 2000. 'An overview of Mono phonology'. In H. Ekkehard Wolff & Orin Gensler (eds.), Proceedings from the 2nd World Congress of African Linguistics, Leipzig 1997, 393–409. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.

External links

• SIL article on new phonetic symbol for labiodental flap