Bambara Language Guide

Official language in
Mali
Script
Latin

Where it's spoken

Article 31 of Mali's constitution says that the national languages are the official languages of Mali, that an organic law determines the conditions and procedures for their use, and that French is the working language. One academic paper lists Bambara among the thirteen national languages that a Malian law recognized.

One linguistic sketch says that Bambara (also known as Bamanankan) and its closely related dialect Dioula (Jula) are spoken in Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Gambia, and that Bambara is used not only as an ethnic language but also as a lingua franca.

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Script & pronunciation

The Unicode locale data for Bambara lists ɛ, ɔ, ɲ and ŋ among its main letters, together with the ordinary Latin letters. The same linguistic sketch says that long vowels are written by doubling the vowel, as in náani ("four"), and that tone can be marked with an acute accent for high tone and a grave accent for low tone. It adds that one native-speaker textbook writes the tones only where they are needed to avoid confusion. This app's card for "Four, five, six" doubles the vowels in Naani, duuru, wɔɔrɔ and carries no tone marks.

A Universal Dependencies page for Bambara notes that the apostrophe may be part of a word, as in k’, n’, y’, b’ and t’. In this app, the card for "I don't understand" is N t'a faamu.

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Grammar essentials

The linguistic sketch calls Bambara an SOV language in which the subject is typically followed by auxiliary elements, giving the pattern subject, auxiliary, object, verb. The Universal Dependencies page gives the same default order. This app's card for "I understand", N ye a faamu, has that shape: N is the subject, ye the marker, a the object and faamu the verb.

The Universal Dependencies page describes bɛ as the imperfect affirmative auxiliary and tɛ as the imperfect negative auxiliary, and ye and ma as the perfective (transitive) and the perfect negative. A Peace Corps manual teaches bɛ and tɛ as the present-tense markers, with the direct object placed before the verb. This app's card for "I don't understand" uses tɛ, contracted to t'a before the object a, and the card for "It's OK / No problem" is Baasi tɛ. The manual gives bɛ for existence, location and state, and tɛ as its negative, as in "Tɔɔrɔ tɛ", "There is no trouble."

The linguistic sketch says that the negative auxiliary mán replaces the stative auxiliary ka. In this app, the cards for "Good" and "Bad" are A ka ɲi and A man ɲi, with ka or man placed before the same word ɲi.

The Peace Corps manual shows the question form with wa in brackets after the verb, as in I bɛ Tubabukan mɛn wa? This app asks "Do you speak English?" as I bɛ angilɛkan mɛn wa?, and "Are you well?" as I ka kɛnɛ wa?

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Politeness & etiquette

The Peace Corps manual says that greetings are a way of showing the respect that people have for each other, that a greeting should always begin with a handshake, and that one should never be in so much of a hurry that there is no time to greet someone.

According to the same manual, Bambara divides the day into four parts for greetings (the morning, the heat of the day around noon, the afternoon, and the evening and night), with a greeting for each. It translates i ni sɔgɔma literally as "you and the morning". This app has I ni sɔgɔma ("Good morning"), I ni tile, I ni wula ("Good afternoon / Good evening") and I ni su ("Good night").

The manual says that nba is the male response to a greeting and nse the female response. This app has Nba and Nse as separate cards, "(Man's reply) Hello to you" and "(Woman's reply) Hello to you". The linguistic sketch lists a singular "you" and a separate plural "you", á(w), and the manual's greeting chart offers i or aw before ni.

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