Seenku is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group spoken in southwestern Burkina Faso by
approximately 17 000 speakers. It has undergone a lot of phonological reduction leading to a
rich segmental and tonal phoneme inventory but mainly mono- and sesquisyllabic roots. The
language has four contrastive levels of tone that combine to create over a dozen contours. Tone
has a high functional load lexically and grammatically permeating all aspects of grammar. Most
verbs have two stem forms: a realis form and an irrealis form. The realis is derived from the
irrealis by infixing a high vowel before the stem vowel creating a diphthong. The use of a
particular stem form is determined by aspect and construction type but most other
morphosyntactic meanings (e.g. progressive aspect or causative) are expressed analytically.
Like most Mande languages Seenku has an S Aux O V X word order in addition to areal
clause-final negation. It displays a reduced set of post-subject predicate markers compared to
other Mande languages and those that are attested are variably realized only by tone changes
and lengthening on the subject itself.
