As many of you know, France and West African
countries have decided to invade Mali and push out Islamic militants
responsible for the coup d’ état. Now is a good enough time to discuss Bambara,
one of the largest indigenous languages of Mali.
As Mali was once a French colony, the official language
of Mali is French. However about eighty percent of the population, 13 million
people, speak Bambara.
The Bambara language is the mother tongue of the
Bambara ethnic group, numbering about 2,700,000 people, but serves also as a
lingua franca in Mali (it is estimated that about 80% of the population speaks
it as a first or second language).
Linguistic
Classification
Bambara is a Niger-Congo language. It is closely
related to the languages Jula and Marka. Bambara belongs to a group of closely-related
languages called Manding, within the larger Mandé group.
Bomara is an SOV language. This means: subject,
object, verb usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, then "Sam
oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual
Standard English "Sam ate oranges".
