Mende /ˈmɛndi/[2] (Mɛnde yia) is a major language of Sierra Leone, with some speakers in neighboring Liberia and Guinea.

It is spoken by the Mende people and by other ethnic groups as a regional lingua franca in southern Sierra Leone.

[15] Ralph Eberl-Elber, an Austrian ethnologist,[16] published two Mende tales with English translations as he heard them in Sierra Leone in the 1935.

[17] The American anthropologist Marion Dusser de Barenne Kilson worked with Mende storytellers in Sierra Leone as a graduate student in 1959 and 1960 (her husband, the political scientist Martin Kilson, was also conducting research in Sierra Leone at the time).

[20] Mende was used extensively in the films Amistad and Blood Diamond and was the subject of the documentary film The Language You Cry In about the connections between the Gullah people of present-day Georgia and their ancestors from Sierra Leone, beginning with the work of Lorenzo Dow Turner who documented Gullah memories of the Mende language.