Bambara language


Bambara, also known as Bamana or Bamanankan is a lingua franca and national language of Mali 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 subject–object–verb clause structure and two lexical tones. The native name bamanankan means "the language of heathens, people who refuse Islam", as opposed to speakers of Dyula, who are Muslim.

Classification

Bambara is a variety of a group of closely related languages called Manding, whose native speakers trace their cultural history to the medieval Mali Empire. Varieties of Manding are generally considered 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, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast and the Gambia. Manding is part of the larger Mandé family of languages.

Alphabet and literature

It uses seven vowels a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ and u, each of which can be nasalized, pharyngealized and murmured, giving a total number of 21 vowels.
Writing with the Latin alphabet began during the French occupation, and the first orthography was introduced in 1967. Literacy is limited, especially in rural areas. Although written literature is only slowly evolving, there exists a wealth of oral literature, which is often tales of kings and heroes. This oral literature is mainly tradited by the griots 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.

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 Ségou, 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 ; Beledugu, Bananba, Mesekele ; Jitumu, Jamaladugu, Segu ; Cakadugu, Keleyadugu, Jalakadougu, Kurulamini, Banimɔncɛ, Cɛmala, Cɛndugu, Baninkɔ, Shɛndugu, Ganadugu ; Kala, Kuruma, Saro, dialects to the northeast of Mopti ; Zegedugu, Bɛndugu, Bakɔkan, Jɔnka.,

Writing

Since 1967, Bambara has mostly been written in the Latin script, using some additional phonetic characters. The vowels are a, e, ɛ , i, o, ɔ , u; accents can be used to indicate tonality. The former digraph ny is now written ɲ 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 "ŋ" is written as "ŋ", although in early publications it was often transcribed as ng or nk.
The N'Ko alphabet is a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Manding languages of West Africa; N’Ko means 'I say' in all Manding languages. Kante created N’Ko 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 of Assatiémala. Named for the first characters in Couloubayi's preferred collation order, Masaba is a syllabary which uses diacritics to indicate vowel qualities such as tone, length, 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. 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.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Each consonant represents a single sound. Although, there are some exceptions:
Like Turkish and Japanese, it is an agglutinative language, meaning that morphemes are glued together to form a word.
The basic sentence structure is Subject Object Verb. Take the phrase, "n t'a don". "n" is the subject, "a" is the object, and " don" is the verb. The "t'" is from the present tense marker "té." "té" is the negative present tense marker and "bé" is the affirmative present tense marker. Therefore, "n b'a don" would mean "I know it".
Bambara is an SOV language and has two tones; e.g. sa 'die' vs. sá '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. Naturally, if the verb is intransitive, the direct object is absent.
Bambara does not inflect for gender. Gender for a noun can be specified by adding an adjective, -cɛ or -kɛ for male and -muso for female. The plural is formed by attaching a vocalic suffix -u, most often with a low tone to nouns or adjectives.
Bambara uses postpositions in much the same manner as languages like English and French use prepositions. These postpositions are found after the noun and are used to express direction, location, and in some cases, possession.

Loan words

In urban areas, many Bamanankan conjunctions have been replaced in everyday use by French borrowings that often mark code-switches. The Bamako dialect makes use of sentences like: N taara Kita mais il n'y avait personne là-bas. : I went to Kita but there was no one there . The sentence in Bamanankan alone would be Ń taara Kita nka mɔkɔ si tun tɛ 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"
However, one could also say:
I ka kulosi ye nɛrɛmukuman ye, also meaning "your skirt is yellow." The original Bamanankan word for yellow comes from "nɛrɛmuku," being flour made from néré, a seed from a long seed pod. Nɛrɛmuku 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 Sangaré, Sidiki Diabaté, Rokia Traoré, Ali Farka Touré, Salif Keita, Habib Koité, and the married duo Amadou & Mariam often sing in Bambara. Aïda of the band Métisse often sings in Dioula, as does Mory Kanté, born in Guinea to a Malian mother; his most famous song to date is "Yeke Yeke". Lyrics in Bambara occur on Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants". Tiken Jah Fakoly often sings reggae in Dyula and French.
Additionally, in 2010, Spanish rock group Dover released its 7th studio album I Ka Kené with the majority of lyrics in the language. American rapper Nas also released a track titled "Sabari" in 2010, which featured Damian Marley. Sabari is a Bambara word that means patience.

Legal status

Bambara is one of several languages designated by Mali as a national language.

Descriptions

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