Word.ws English Dictionary

jeliya

jeliya noun: the traditional music of the jeli (or griot) caste of the Mande people.

Noun

jeliya (uncountable)

  1. The traditional music of the jeli (or griot) caste of the Mande people.
    • In the absence of Bamana music on the scene in Bamako, some foreign scholars even concluded that all jeliya, the music of the Mande jeliw, is essentially heptatonic.2013, Lucy Durán, “POYI! Bamana jeli music, Mali and the blues”, in Journal of African Cultural Studies, volume 9, number 25, Routledge, →DOI, →JSTOR, page 231

Origin of jeliya

From Bambara jeliya (literally “being a jeli; 'jeli-ness'”).

Questions about jeliya

What does jeliya mean?
Jeliya means the traditional music of the jeli (or griot) caste of the Mande people.
What part of speech is jeliya?
Jeliya is a noun.

Words near jeliya in the dictionary

  1. jelicks
  2. Jelinek
  3. Jelinekian
  4. Jelineks
  5. jelis
  6. jeliya
  7. jelk
  8. jelked
  9. jelking
  10. jelks
  11. jell

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jeliya (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.

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