Bambara

Bambara, also called Bamana or Bamanankan, is a lingua franca and national language of Mali. It is spoken natively by about 4.2 million Bambara people and as a second language by about 10 million more, so that perhaps 14 million people use it, and it is estimated that roughly 80 percent of the population of Mali speaks Bambara as a first or second language. It is a Mande language written in the N'Ko script, in Arabic script and in a Latin-based orthography, has a subject-object-verb clause structure and distinguishes two lexical tones. It is recorded here so that literary and media works originally made in Bambara are grouped under the language itself rather than under the wider Mande family.