CHAPTER XXXI 



THE LANGUAGES OF LIBERIA 



THE native languages of Eiberia — so far as they are 

 known — fall into five groups : — (i) Kru ; (2) Kpwesi ; 

 (3) Mandingo; (4) GoRA ; and (5) Bulom. 



The three first groups have perhaps more fundamental 

 relationship than is the case with the two last. Gora is an 

 almost isolated language, with a very slight resemblance in its 

 vocabulary, here and there, to the Kru group, to the Mandingo, 

 or even to the Bulom. This last-named is onlv represented 

 in Liberia by the Kisi language, spoken to the west of Boporo 

 near the Sierra Leone frontier. Kisi is obviously related to the 

 Bulom group of South-eastern Sierra Leone in its word-roots, 

 but it has developed a very different grammatical construction, 

 its nouns changing from singular to plural by an alteration in 

 the termination, and not by the application of a prefix, as in 

 Bulom and the Sherbro dialects. Bulom belongs to a large, 

 scattered group of languages (which includes Temne) along the 

 coast-line of Northern Guinea, between Sherbro on the south 

 and the Gambia on the north. An illusive resemblance to the 

 Bantu family is offered by the feature they have in common 

 of pronominal prefixes. All the other language -groups west 

 and south of the Niger (so far as we know) change the number 

 and signification of the noun by suffixes or alterations in the 

 terminal syllable. 



Yet although the Fula language (for example) is a suffix- 



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