jeli
jeli noun: a member of the hereditary caste of griots among the Mandé peoples, whose social roles include transmitting their people's oral traditions and playing traditional music (jeliya).
Noun
jeli (plural jelis)
- A member of the hereditary caste of griots among the Mandé peoples, whose social roles include transmitting their people's oral traditions and playing traditional music (jeliya).
- Jeliya (the art of the jeli) goes back to the thirteenth-century origins of the Mali empire, although the institution of the griot in West Africa probably stems from the earlier Ghana empire (also known as Wagadu), which declined in the late eleventh century.2000, Eric Charry, Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 3
- Synonyms:
- griot
Synonyms of jeli
Forms of jeli
| plural | jelis |
|---|
Origin of jeli
From Bambara jeli.
Questions about jeli
- What does jeli mean?
- Jeli means a member of the hereditary caste of griots among the Mandé peoples, whose social roles include transmitting their people's oral traditions and playing traditional music (jeliya).
- What part of speech is jeli?
- Jeli is a noun.
- What is the plural of jeli?
- The plural of jeli is jelis.
Words near jeli in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: jeli (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “jeli.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jeli. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.