Where Bambara is spoken
Bambara is spoken in 4 countries: Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Senegal. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Mali | 48% | 10,555,488 |
| Guinea | Not given | Not given |
| Ivory Coast | Not given | Not given |
| Senegal | Not given | Not given |
Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.
On the map, Bambara is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Bambara.
How many people speak Bambara?
Wikidata gives about 4.2 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 27th Edition, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.
Where Bambara sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Bambara as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Mande
- Western Mande
- Manding-Kpelle
- Central Mande
- Manding-Jogo
- Manding-Vai
- Manding-Mokole
- Manding
- East Manding
- Bambara
Related languages
Other languages in the East Manding group:
More about Bambara
Codes: ISO 639-3 bam, Glottolog bamb1269. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.
Questions about Bambara
Where is Bambara spoken?
Bambara is spoken in Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Senegal. Unicode CLDR puts it at 48% of the population of Mali, which is about 10,555,488 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Bambara?
Wikidata gives about 4.2 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 27th Edition, 2012). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.
Which language family is Bambara in?
Glottolog places Bambara in the Mande family, in the branch Western Mande, Manding-Kpelle, Central Mande, Manding-Jogo, Manding-Vai, Manding-Mokole, Manding and East Manding.