Manding

The Manding languages form a dialect continuum within the Mande family, itself possibly part of the larger Niger-Congo family, spoken across West Africa in countries including Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The varieties, which include Mandinka, Bambara, Maninka and Jula, are generally mutually intelligible among native speakers and are used by roughly 37 million people in total, with about 9.1 million as native speakers; the group splits into western and eastern branches, distinguished mainly by vowel inventory, with ten vowels in the west against fourteen in the east. Manding has a strong oral tradition but is also written, using Arabic-derived Ajami script, the Latin alphabet, and the N'ko script devised for it in 1949.