UNICEF WCARO NLP Landscape

West and Central Africa Language Technology

Last updated: 2026-04-23

Work in progress. Some data may contain inaccuracies. Contribute on GitHub

Mende

men

🌍 General Information

ISO 639-3men

ISO 639-1—

French Namemendé

Glottocodemend1266

Language FamilyNiger–Congo

Writing SystemLatin Mende Kikakui script

L1 Speakers2.5 million

L2 Speakers—

Population1800000 (10⁶+)

Endangermentsafe

CountriesLiberia, Sierra Leone

Also Known AsBoumpe, Hulo, Mende (Sierra Leone), Mɛnde, Mɛnde yia

WikipediaMende on Wikipedia

🗺️ Language Use

🗺️

Language use data not yet available for Mende in CLEAR Global's platform.

See the sections below for other available data.

🤖 NLP & Tech Resources

Endangered Languages Project

✓ AfroLID

✓ Fineweb2: 💬

✓ CMU Wilderness

✓ MMS-ASR

✓ MMS-TTS

✓ MMS-LID

✓ Omnilingual ASR

📝 Notes

Observations

Appears in Survey Focus 1 for Sierra Leone (2026 UNICEF WCAR Local Languages Survey)
Also in Use Cases Document: Sierra Leone offline parenting micro-learning, digital literacy on Learning Passport, WASH SOP micro-lessons (Krio, Mende, Temne)

ASR Models (1)

Model	Downloads	Likes
espnet/xeus	60	146

View on HuggingFace: men: 1

TTS Models (0)

No TTS models found.

MT Models (4)

Model	Size	Downloads	Likes
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-tc-bible-big-deu_eng_fra_por_spa-mul	0.2B	88	1
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-tc-bible-big-mul-deu_eng_nld	0.2B	54	2
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-tc-bible-big-mul-deu_eng_fra_por_spa	0.2B	54	2
vonjack/opus-mt-mul-en-big	0.3B	39	4

View on HuggingFace: men: 4

LLM Models (0)

No LLM models found.

Datasets

ASR Datasets (0)

No datasets found.

TTS Datasets (0)

No datasets found.

Translation Datasets (3)

Dataset	Rows	Downloads	Likes
gtak1/panlex-meanings	64.1M	6.3K	0
cointegrated/panlex-meanings	157.0M	255	13
community-datasets/udhr	—	123	2

View on HuggingFace: men: 3