The Bandi language, also known as Bande, Gbande, Gbandi and Gbunde, is a Mande language. It is spoken primarily in Lofa County

Lofa County

Lofa is a county in the northernmost portion of the West African nation of Liberia. One of 15 counties that comprise the first-level of administrative division in the nation, it has six districts. Voinjama serves as the capital with the area of the county measuring...

 in northern Liberia

Liberia

Liberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...

 by the Bandi people.

Bandi has six dialect

Dialect

The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...

s: Hasala, Hembeh, Lukasa, Wawana, Wulukoha, and Tahamba, which is the dialect used for literature. The dialects have a lexical similarity

Lexical similarity

In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words....

 of 96% among one another, and 83% with the most similar dialect of the Mende language

Mende language

Mende is a major language of Sierra Leone, with some speakers in neighboring Liberia. It is spoken by the Mende people and by other ethnic groups as a regional lingua franca in southern Sierra Leone....

.