In Bambara, the word for yellow comes from a flour made of locust beans
Around 80 percent of Malians speak Bambara, first or second language, and it colours everything from Bamako street talk to songs by Oumou Sangaré and Amadou and Mariam. Its vocabulary tells stories: yellow is named after a seed flour used in sauces, and snow had to be borrowed from French.
Bambara, also called Bamanankan, is Mali's lingua franca, spoken by perhaps 14 million people: about 4.2 million native Bambara speakers and roughly 10 million who learned it as a second language. It belongs to the Manding family, whose speakers trace their heritage to the medieval Mali Empire, and it is densest around Bamako, especially towards Ségou. Dozens of local dialects exist, but the standard form leans heavily on Maninkakan.
The grammar orders sentences as subject, object, then verb, and uses postpositions rather than prepositions. So n t'a lon means I do not know it, while n b'a don means I know it. Two tones separate otherwise identical words, as with sa, die, and sá, snake. Nouns carry no grammatical gender, though suffixes can mark male or female, and a plural is formed by adding a vowel sound written -w. Seven basic vowels, each of which can be nasalised, pharyngealised or murmured, yield 21 in total.
Scripts have been contested. French colonisation brought Latin letters, and an official spelling followed in 1967. In 1949 Solomana Kante invented N'Ko, meaning I say, to counter claims that Africans lacked a culture of writing. From 1930 Woyo Couloubayi developed another system, the Masaba syllabary. Borrowings come from Arabic in religion and trade, from Wolof and Baoulé, and increasingly from French, usually with an i sound added. City speakers often slide mid-sentence into French.
Music has carried it far. Beyond Malian stars like Ali Farka Touré, Rokia Traoré and Fatoumata Diawara, Bambara lyrics appear on a Stevie Wonder album, and in 2010 the Spanish rock band Dover titled its seventh album I Ka Kené, singing mostly in Bambara, Spanish and English. Under a constitution approved in 2023, Bambara became co-official with 12 other languages, and French was kept only as a working language.
Source: Bambara language
