|Region||central southern Mali and neighboring areas| |Native
speakers||2.8 million (1995) Spoken to varying degrees by 80% of
the population of Mali |Writing system||N'Ko, Latin| Bambara,
also known as Bamana, and Bamanankan by speakers of the
language, is a language spoken in Mali, and to a lesser extent
Burkina Faso and Senegal, by as many as six million people
(including second language users). The Bambara language is the
language of people of the Bambara ethnic group, numbering about
4,000,000 people, but serves also as a lingua franca in Mali (it
is estimated that about 80 percent of the population speak it as
a first or second language). It is a Subject–object–verb
language and has two tones. Bambara is a language/dialect of the
Manding language cluster, a cluster of languages whose ethnic-
speakers generally trace their cultural history to the ancient
city of Manding, where modern-day Kita, Mali now exists. Bambara
is classified as part of the larger, very broad Mandé group.
Dialects of Manding are gen