Manding and Bambara music with lyrics spelled correctly

One of the major reasons that Westerners seem to get interested in learning Manding is because of the music.

While this was never the case for me, it’s easy to see why: West African music is beautiful; Mali is a major hub for it; and some of the biggest artists like Amadou & Mariam, Tiken Jah, Alpha Blondy, Oumou Sangaré (pictured adjacent and see her video below) or Salif Keïta sing in Manding.

A decent amount of the people who reach out to me about lessons or learning materials say that one of their major goals is being able to understand the lyrics of their favorite songs.

Lack of videos with lyrics written out properly

Unfortunately, while I appreciate the music, I’m not a specialist and I haven’t trained myself to interpret lyrics — a task which can be hard enough even in one’s own language if the context and content of the song are unclear.

As such, I have never used Manding song lyrics in any of my teaching or even been able to point students to any websites or resources that could help them since often interpretations of Manding songs’ lyrics that one finds on random websites are wrong.

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Wrong spelling, interpretation and translation of lyrics from the song “Sabali” by Amadou & Mariam

(Take for example this Google snippet of a Quora post about sabali which while right about the broad meaning of sabali but includes a bogus attempt to write out the rest of the words in the song and a translation that wrong too.)

Alternatively, the lyrics are written out, but they are spelled n’importe comment — like in this attempt to transcribe the Jula of Tiken Jah.

Some videos with Bambara lyrics written out properly

Yesterday though, I was pleased to discover the work of a YouTube user that offers a beautiful and properly spelled version of two songs in Bambara! (Though there are a few places where I would use a different spelling — see the end of this post. Update 2019-10-18: Also see this in-depth mark-up that I did of the Oumou video)

Here are the two videos:

Oumou Sangaré’s “Diaraby Nene” with lyrics

Sidiki Diabaté’s “Galo te me bolila” with lyrics

Should I find similar videos in the future, perhaps I’ll add them to this page. In the meantime, i ni baara to lady behind these curated videos :-)

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Spelling Conventions Comments

Christy’s videos use two conventions that jump out to me as ones slightly idiosyncratic:

• N’ko with an apostrophe instead of n ko — This convention was historically used by some authors (Side note: this convention explains the Latin spelling of the N’ko writing system that uses an apostrophe)

• maana instead of mana for the conditional predicate marker — I hadn’t encountered this spelling convention before.

• Word boundaries — There’s a few instances where some of the words are written separately but I would have written them together or with hyphens since they are in fact tonally compact compounds.