Bambara (
Arabic script: ), also known as Bamana (
N'Ko script: ) or Bamanankan (), is a
lingua franca
A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...
and
national language of
Mali
Mali (; ), officially the Republic of Mali,, , ff, 井仆不丐仆不五 丐中五, Renndaandi Maali, italics=no, ar, 堿堭堜 塈, Jumh贖riyyt Ml蘋 is a landlocked country in West Africa. Ma ...
spoken by perhaps 15 million people, natively by 5 million
Bambara people and about 10 million
second-language users. It is estimated that about 80 percent of the population of Mali speak Bambara as a first or second language. It has a
subjectobjectverb clause structure and two lexical
tones.
Classification
Bambara is a variety of a group of closely related languages called
Manding Manding may refer to:
* Manding languages, a language-dialect continuum in West Africa
* Mandinka (disambiguation)
** Mandinka language, one of the Manding languages
** Mandinka people, a West African ethnic group
* The Mand矇 peoples who speak Man ...
, whose native speakers trace their cultural history to the medieval
Mali Empire
The Mali Empire ( Manding: ''Mand矇''Ki-Zerbo, Joseph: ''UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. IV, Abridged Edition: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century'', p. 57. University of California Press, 1997. or Manden; ar, 塈, Ml ...
. Varieties of Manding are generally considered (among native speakers) to be mutually intelligible dependent on exposure or familiarity with dialects between speakers and spoken by 30 to 40 million people in the countries
Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso (, ; , ff, 今云仇五仆丐 丐之亢, italic=no) is a landlocked country in West Africa with an area of , bordered by Mali to the northwest, Niger to the northeast, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana to the ...
,
Senegal
Senegal,; Wolof: ''Senegaal''; Pulaar: 井仆井內丐中五 (Senegaali); Arabic: 塈堻媞塈 ''As-Sinighal'') officially the Republic of Senegal,; Wolof: ''R矇ewum Senegaal''; Pulaar : 井仆不丐仆不 ...
,
Guinea-Bissau,
Guinea
Guinea ( ),, fuf, 五仆井, italic=no, Gine, wo, Gine, nqo, 葶舝葖, bm, Gine officially the Republic of Guinea (french: R矇publique de Guin矇e), is a coastal country in West Africa. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the we ...
,
Liberia
Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to LiberiaSierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to its north, Ivory Coast to its east, and the Atlantic Ocean ...
,
Ivory Coast
Ivory Coast, also known as C繫te d'Ivoire, officially the Republic of C繫te d'Ivoire, is a country on the southern coast of West Africa. Its capital is Yamoussoukro, in the centre of the country, while its largest city and economic centre is ...
and
the Gambia. Manding is part of the larger
Mand矇 family of languages.
Geographical distribution
Bambara is spoken throughout Mali as a lingua franca. The language is most widely spoken in the areas east, south, and north of Bamako, where native speakers and/or those that identify as members of the Bambara ethnic group are most densely populated. These regions are also usually considered to be the historical geographical origin of Bambara people, particularly
S矇gou, after diverging from other Manding groups.
Dialects
The main dialect is Standard Bamara, which has significant influence from Maninkakan. Bambara has many local dialects: Kaarta, Tambacounda (west); Beledugu, Bananba, Mesekele (north); Jitumu, Jamaladugu, Segu (center); Cakadugu, Keleyadugu, Jalakadougu, Kurulamini, Banimnc, Cmala, Cndugu, Banink, Shndugu, Ganadugu (south); Kala, Kuruma, Saro, dialects to the northeast of Mopti (especially Br); Zegedugu, Bndugu, Bakkan, Jnka (southeast).,
Writing
Since 1967, Bambara has mostly been written in the
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greece, Greek city of Cumae, in southe ...
, using
some additional phonetic characters. The vowels are ''a, e,
'' (formerly ''
癡''
), ''i, o,
'' (formerly ''
簷''
), ''u''
; accents can be used to indicate tonality. The former digraph ''ny'' is now written ''
价'' when it designates a palatal nasal glide; the ''ny'' spelling is kept for the combination of a nasal vowel with a subsequent oral palatal glide. Following the 1966 Bamako spelling conventions, a nasal velar glide "
" is written as "
", although in early publications it was often transcribed as ''ng'' or ''nk''.
The
N'Ko
N'Ko () is a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949, as a modern writing system for the Mand矇 languages of West Africa. The term ''N'Ko'', which means ''I say'' in all Mand矇 languages, is also used for the Mand矇 literary standard writt ...
( nqo, ) alphabet is a script devised by
Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Manding languages of West Africa; NKo means 'I say' in all Manding languages. Kante created NKo in response to what he felt were beliefs that Africans were a "cultureless people" since prior to this time there had been no indigenous African writing system for his language. N'ko first gained a strong user base around the Maninka-speaking area of Kante's hometown of Kankan, Guinea and disseminated from there into other Manding-speaking parts of West Africa. N'ko and the
Arabic script are still in use for Bambara, although only the Latin-based orthography is officially recognized in Mali.
Additionally, a script known as Masaba or Ma-sa-ba was developed for the language beginning in 1930 by Woyo Couloubayi (c.1910-1982) of Assati矇mala. Named for the first characters in Couloubayi's preferred
collation order, Masaba is a
syllabary
In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words.
A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...
which uses diacritics to indicate vowel qualities such as
tone,
length
Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with dimension distance. In most systems of measurement a base unit for length is chosen, from which all other units are derived. In the Interna ...
, and
nasalization. Though not conclusively related to other writing systems, Masaba appears to draw on traditional Bambara iconography and shares some similarities with the
Vai syllabary of Liberia and with Arabic-derived secret alphabets used in
Hodh
Hodh or () is a region of West Africa. Barth, Henry''Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, being a Journal of an Expedition undertaken under the Auspices of H.B.M.'s Government, in the Years 1849–1855'', Vol. 3, pp.&nbs ...
(now
Hodh El Gharbi and
Hodh Ech Chargui Regions of Mauritania
Mauritania is divided into 15 regions:
During the Mauritanian occupation of Western Sahara (197579), its portion of the territory (roughly corresponding to the lower half of R穩o de Oro province) was named Tiris al-Gharbiyya.
The regions ...
). As of 1978, Masaba was in limited use in several communities in
Nioro Cercle for accounting, personal correspondence, and the recording of Muslim prayers; the script's current status and prevalence is unknown.
Latin orthography
It uses seven vowels a, e, , i, o, and u, each of which can be nasalized, pharyngealized and murmured, giving a total number of 21 vowels (the letters approximate their
IPA equivalents).
Writing with the Latin alphabet began during the
French
French (french: fran癟ais(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
colonization, and the first orthography was introduced in 1967. Literacy is limited, especially in rural areas. Although written literature is only slowly evolving (due to the predominance of French as the "language of the educated"), there exists a wealth of
oral literature
Oral literature, orature or folk literature is a genre of literature that is spoken or sung as opposed to that which is written, though much oral literature has been transcribed. There is no standard definition, as anthropologists have used vary ...
, which is often tales of kings and heroes. This oral literature is mainly passed on by the
griots (''Jeliw'' in Bambara) who are a mixture of
storytellers, praise singers, and human history books who have studied the trade of singing and reciting for many years. Many of their songs are very old and are said to date back to the old empire of Mali.
Alphabet
* A a
* B be
* C ce
矷* D de
* E e
*
* F ef
* G ge
* H ha
* I i
* J je
矷* K ka
* L l
* M m
* N n
* 价e
*
* O o
*
* P pe
* R r
* S s
* T te
* U u
* W wa
* Y ye
* Z ze
Other letters
* kh
(used for loanwords from other African languages)
* -n nasalises vowel
* sh she
(regional variant of s)
N'ko orthography
Vowels
* a
* e
* i
*
* u
* o
*
Consonants
* ba
* pa
* ta
* ja
矷* ca
矷* da
* / ra
* sa
* ? ga
//氿* gba
﹠}* fa
* ka
* la
* 腄 ma
* 腡 nya/价a
* nga/a
* 舝 na
* 艄 wa
* 艀 ya
* 艉 ha
* 葀 nasal vowel
Tones
* 葖 short high
* 葶 short low
* 蒍 long high
* 葥 long low
Phonology
Consonants
Each consonant represents a single sound with some exceptions:
* "W" is pronounced as in English (e.g. wait) except at the end of a word, when it is the plural mark and is pronounced as
* "S" is pronounced most often as in the English word "see" but is sometimes pronounced as "sh"
as in the word "shoe" or as
* "G" is pronounced most often as in the English word "go" but in the middle of a word, it can be pronounced as in the Spanish word "abogado" (
and sometimes at the beginning of a word as
w
Vowels
Grammar
Bambara is an agglutinative language, meaning that morphemes are glued together to form a word.
The basic sentence structure
subject-object-verb (SOV). Take the phrase, ''n t'a lon'' (I don't know
t. ''n'' is the subject (I), ''a'' is the object (it), and ''
alon'' is the verb (
oknow). The ''t' '' is from the negative present tense marker ''t矇'', ''b矇'' being the affirmative present tense marker (''n b'a don'' would mean "I know it"). Like many SOV languages, Bambara uses
postpositions rather than prepositions - their role being similar to English prepositions but placed after the noun.
The language has two (mid/standard and high)
tones; e.g. ''sa'' 'die' vs. ''s獺'' 'snake.' The typical argument structure of the language consists of a subject, followed by an aspectival auxiliary, followed by the direct object, and finally a transitive verb.
Bambara does not inflect for gender. Gender for a noun can be specified by adding an adjective, ''-c'' or ''-k'' for male and ''-muso'' for female. The plural is formed by attaching a vocalic suffix ''-u'', most often with a low tone (in the orthography, ''-w'') to nouns or adjectives.
Loan words
In urban areas, many Bamanankan conjunctions have been replaced in everyday use by French borrowings that often mark
code-switches. The
Bamako
Bamako ( bm, 腄葶葶 ''Bmak'', ff, 丐丰丐仇亢 ''Bamako'') is the capital and largest city of Mali, with a 2009 population of 1,810,366 and an estimated 2022 population of 2.81 million. It is located on the Niger River ...
dialect makes use of sentences like: ''N taara Kita mais il n'y avait personne l-bas.'' : ''I went to Kita
amanankan but there was no one there
rench'' The sentence in Bamanankan alone would be '' taara Kita nka mk si tun t yen.'' The French proposition "est-ce que" is also used in Bamanankan ; however, it is pronounced more slowly and as three syllables, .
Bamanankan uses many French loan words. For example, some people might say:
''I ka
kurusi ye jauni ye'': "Your skirt is yellow" (using a derivation of the French word for yellow, jaune.)
However, one could also say:
''I ka kulosi ye nrmukuman ye'', also meaning "your skirt is yellow." The original Bamanankan word for yellow comes from "''nrmuku''," being flour (''muku'') made from
n矇r矇 (locust bean), a seed from a long seed pod. Nrmuku is often used in sauces in Southern Mali.
Most French loan words are suffixed with the sound 'i'; this is particularly common when using French words which have a meaning not traditionally found in Mali. For example, the Bamanankan word for
snow is ''niegei'', based on the French word for snow ''neige''. As there has never been snow in Mali, there was no unique word in Bamanankan to describe it.
Examples
Music
Malian artists such as
Oumou Sangar矇,
Sidiki Diabat矇
Sidiki Diabat矇 is a Malian kora player, musician and music producer born in 1992 in Bamako, Mali. He is the son of renowned kora player Toumani Diabat矇 and grandson of Sidiki Diabat矇. Diabat矇 belongs to the 77th generation of musicians in a l ...
,
Fatoumata Diawara,
Rokia Traor矇,
Ali Farka Tour矇,
Habib Koit矇 and the married duo
Amadou & Mariam often sing in Bambara. Lyrics in Bambara occur on ''
Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants"
''Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants"'' is an album by Stevie Wonder, originally released on the Tamla Motown label on October 30, 1979. It is the soundtrack to the documentary ''The Secret Life of Plants'', directed by W ...
''.
Additionally, in 2010,
Spanish rock group
Dover
Dover () is a town and major ferry port in Kent, South East England. It faces France across the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel at from Cap Gris Nez in France. It lies south-east of Canterbury and east of Maidstone ...
released its 7th studio album
I Ka Ken矇
I Ka Ken矇 is the seventh album by the Madrid-based group, Dover (band), Dover, released on 4 October 2010. The title means "Are you fine?" in the Bambara language, Bambara language.
The songs were composed between March 2009 and May 2010. The alb ...
with the majority of lyrics in the language. American rapper
Nas also released a track titled "Sabali" in 2010, which featured
Damian Marley. ''Sabali'' is a Bambara word that means patience.
Legal status
Bambara is one of several languages designated by Mali as a
national language.
References
Citation
Sources
* Bailleul Ch. ''Dictionnaire Bambara-Fran癟ais.'' 3e 矇dition corrig矇e. Bamako : Donniya, 2007, 476 p.
* Bird, Charles, Hutchison, John & Kant矇, Mamadou (1976) ''An Ka Bamanankan Kalan: Beginning Bambara''. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Linguistics Club.
* Bird, Charles & Kant矇, Mamadou (1977) ''Bambara-English, English-Bambara student lexicon''. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Linguistics Club.
* Dumestre G矇rard. ''Grammaire fondamentale du bambara.'' Paris : Karthala, 2003.
* Dumestre, G矇rard. ''Dictionnaire bambara-fran癟ais suivi dun index abr矇g矇 fran癟ais-bambara.'' Paris : Karthala, 2011. p. 1189
*
Eidelberg, JosephBambara (A PROTO-HEBREW LANGUAGE?)
* Kastenholz, Raimund (1998) ''Grundkurs Bambara (Manding) mit Texten'' (second revised edition) (Afrikawissenschaftliche Lehrb羹cher Vol. 1). K繹ln: R羹diger K繹ppe.
* Konar矇, Demba (1998) ''Je parle bien bamanan''. Bamako: Jamana.
* Morales, Jos矇 (2010) ''J'apprends le bambara. 61 conversations'', (book + CD-ROM). Paris: Editions Karthala.
* Tour矇, Mohamed & Leucht, Melanie (1996) ''Bambara Lesebuch: Originaltexte mit deutscher und franz繹sischer bersetzung = Chrestomathie Bambara: textes originaux Bambara avec traductions allemandes et fran癟aises'' (with illustrations by Melanie Leucht) (Afrikawissenschaftliche Lehrb羹cher Vol. 11) . K繹ln: R羹diger K繹ppe.
*
External links
Descriptions
Dictionaries
Maliyiri.comis a website which provides English-Bambara-French translations and is a community-based project where users can add new words, comments, provide feedback and follow one another.
online and downloadable Bambara-French Dictionary (about 11,500 entries by the end of 2014), with a French-Bambara index, linked with the Corpus Bambara de R矇f矇rence
* An ka taa'
Mobile-friendly Bambara-English dictionarythat includes French and Jula.
*
Bambara entries (>2300) in the French Wiktionary
Bambara-French-English dictionaryonline and downloadable lexicons for language learners
Learning materials
* on peacecorps.gov
Other
Corpus Bambara de R矇f矇renceCorpus Bambara de R矇f矇rence, an electronic corpus of Bambara texts (about 2,000,000 words end 2014)
* Maliyiri.com'
Android application with thousands of daily users, provides English-Bambara-French translations and users can choose to get daily/weekly word notifications for continuous learning.
Bambara Electronic Library, AMALAN LLACANAn ka taa a website with a dictionary, resources and media for learning Bambara and Manding more generally.
Bambara at French Wikibookscontains more material
Mandenkan JournalPanAfriL10n page on Manding(includes information on Bambara)
Maneno in Bambara(a blogging platform with a full Bambara interface)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bambara Language
Languages of Burkina Faso
Languages of Ghana
Languages of Guinea
Languages of Ivory Coast
Languages of Mali
Languages of Senegal
languages of the Gambia
languages of Mauritania
languages of Niger
Manding languages
Subjectobjectverb languages