Moore, spoken by the Mossi, belongs to the Gur group of Niger Congo. Moore is spoken in Central Burkina Faso with small numbers of speakers in Mali and Togo. It is also spoken by Mossi working in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.
Grimes (1996) gives a figure of 4.6 million speakers and (citing David Delwa 1992) estimates 2 million second language speakers. Tiendrebeogo (1982) and Yago (1982), based on the 1975 census, list 2.7 million speakers of Moore, while UBS notes 2.5 million. Johnson (1978) lists 175,000 first-language Moore speakers in Ghana. Canu (1981) states that the latest surveys indicate about 1.7 million people have Moore as their mother tongue.
Moore is widely used as a lingua franca as well as for a first language. Broadcasts in Moore are heard in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire.
"Moore does have a standard official orthography. It was elaborated in 1977 by the Commission nationale des langues voltaïques" (Nikiéma, personal communication, 1985).
One set of materials should be sufficient, based on the Ouagadougu dialect.
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