1) Greetings

Pretty much the first thing that you need to learn when starting a new language is how to greet people.

In this chapter, we are focusing on "standard" greetings in Bambara. While things can differ slightly in Jula and Maninka, if you use what follows, you'll be understood by pretty much anyone who speaks Manding.

Four times of day

There are four primary greetings to use depending on the time of the day. They all follow the same format, which looks like this:

I ni + TIME OF DAY

You will vary "Time of day" by one of the following:

• sɔgɔma : morning
• tile : day; sun
• wula : afternoon; early evening
• su : night

So this gives you the four following options for typical greetings depending on the time of day:

• I ni sɔgɔma : Good morning
• I ni tile : Good day
• I ni wula : Good afternoon
• I ni su : Good evening

There are not firm rules about the exact time (e.g., 10:30am) at which one moves between the four times.

For many Manding speakers, Muslim prayer times play an important role in their sense of when we have gone from tile to wula.

You'll eventually get a feel for when it's best to use one over the other. In the meantime, here's a rough approximation of when to use the greetings:

• sɔgɔma early morning noon-ish
• tile noon-ish to 3pm-ish
• wula 3pm-ish to night time proper
• su night time proper until the sun begins to rise

Singular vs. Pural: 'You and'

Literally, i ni means 'you and'. So in the strictest sense a greeting like i ni sɔgɔma means 'You and the morning'.

More specifically, i is the singular form of 'you'.

This means that greetings like i ni + sɔgɔma, wula, etc., are for greeting a single person.

To greet multiple people in Bambara, one replaces i with á or aw (pronounced as if it were written [au]).

The words á and aw are different forms of the same thing: the second person plural pronoun, 'you all'. (You will learn more about the details of pronouns in Chapter 12.) They are interchangeable for the purposes of greetings!

(The word á can also be written as a if you are not marking tone. Yes, Manding is a tonal language, but let's not worry about that for now either!)

So to greet a group of people in the morning, you would say:

Á/Aw ni sɔgɔma
'Good morning' (to a group of people)

This same principle applies to all the other times of day as well:

Á/Aw ni + ...

• sɔgɔma: 'Good morning', etc.
• tile
• wula
• su

So you have two second person pronouns as options when greeting people:

• i: 'you' (singular)
• á/aw: 'you all; you guys, etc.'

It's worth noting that you might encounter some variability in the use of i and á; in Jula in Burkina Faso, for instance, one typically just uses á ni + style greetings regardless of how many people you are greeting.

For your purposes, it is probably best to simply learn the "standard" Bambara way of using i for greeting one person and aw for greeting multiple people. Everyone understands the standard forms and you can always adapt your own usage down the road based off what you hear most often!

Responding

Alright, so you know how to greet people! But how do you respond? Greetings are an extended affair in West Africa; we'll cover more of what goes into them down the road.

For now, let's focus on the following two-step sequence for responding:

1. nba/nse: call-and-response interjection
2. Repeating the appropriate i/á/aw ni + time of day

If anyone greets you using any of the forms that you learned above (i ni sɔgɔma, á ni su, etc.), you need to (1) respond with one of the two forms depending on your gender identity:

• nba : male
• nse : female

From there, you (2) can simply repeat the time of day greeting that they used with you.

(NOTE: In Chapter 3, we'll cover alternative ways of responding after nba/nse; repeating the time of day greeting is typical in Bambara)

So here's an exchange where someone greets a woman in the morning:

– I ni sɔgɔma!
– Nse! I ni sɔgɔma!

– Good morning!
– Nse! Good morning!

Note how I didn't translate nse in the second line. That is because both nse and nba are call-and-response interjections that don't lend themselves to a convenient one-to-one translation in English.

You also use nba/nse when you are responding to a greeting that was addressed to you as a part of a larger group of two or more people:

– Aw ni sɔgɔma!
– Nba! I ni sɔgɔma!

– Good morning! (to multiple people)
– Nba! Good morning! (responding back to one person)

► Greeting with activities

In addition to greeting with the time of day, we can also greet with an activity or a context. To do this, we keep the same structure, but we replace sɔgɔma, tile, etc., with a noun befitting of the context:

I/aw ni + ACTIVITY

So, for instance, if you saw a friend who is was working and you wanted to say hello, you might use the word baara ('work') to say something like:

I ni baara!
You + and + work

'Hello' (to someone that is working)

Or if you hadn't seen some friends in a long time, you might use the word fama ('absence') to say something like:

Aw ni fama!
You.all + and + absence

"Hello" (but with a meaning of "I haven't seen you in while!" attached to it)

There's a wide range of nouns that are commonly used to greet with this additional meaning of context. You'll pick them up as you go along, but here's a few to get you started for now:

• sugu = market (as in, "Hello" while at the market)
• tunu = loss; disappearance (as in, "Where you been, man?")
• taama = travel (as in, "Hello" to someone that is engaged in or just returned from traveling)
• se = arrival (as in, "Welcome!"; there's also an alternative expression I/Aw dansɛ without ni that is used to say 'Welcome" in many Jula-speaking areas)

And then, there's one slightly idiomatic one, which is arguably the most useful and frequent:

• ce = "Thank you" or "Hello"

  Historically, ce likely comes from a word that means 'farm labor' (see ci 'labor'). In this way, we can think of it as coming from an expression that meant something close to "You and (your) labor!". In turn, this expression is now a general way to recognize someone's good actions ("Thank you") or a polite way to say "Hello".

In any case, you will always respond to these I/aw ni + ACTIVITY greetings in the same way you do with the times of day: by using nba/nse.

► Multiple greeting phrases in one exchange

Multiple i/aw ni + ___ phrases can and often do occur in a single greeting exchange between people.

For instance, if your old friend returned in early evening from travels after a really long time away from home, you might greet her by saying:

– I ni wula!
– Nse!
– I ni se!
– Nse!
–I ni taama!
–Nse!
–I ni fama!
–Nse!

In English, each one of these sentences would require a totally different structure (e.g., "Hi! Welcome back! How was your trip? It's been so long!"), but in Bambara, you can simply use different types of I/aw ni + ___ greeting phrases.

Because of this, it is really important that you focus not on necessarily understanding what the word that comes after I/aw ni is, but rather on recognizing I ni + ___ or Aw ni + ___ and being able to respond automatically with nba or nse.

Got it? I ni baara! Nice work!

Summary

Ayiwa—alright! We covered the following about greetings:

• Greetings are formed like this:
  • I ni (singular) or á/aw ni (plural) + time of day
• There are four times of day for greeting:
  • sɔgɔma: morning
  • tile: midday
  • wula: afternoon/early evening
  • su: night
• One responds in a two-step process like this:
  • nba (male) or nse (female)
  • repeating the appropriate time of day greeting (e.g., i ni sɔgɔma, etc.)
• Greetings can also used with nouns that define the context of one's hello (e.g, I ni baara 'Hello (to someone that is working)')
• Multiple I/aw ni greetings can appear in one larger sequence of greetings

Flashcards

Ayiwa! Use the following Quizlet “study set” to practice words and expressions from what you just learned!

(👋 Make sure to turn on the sound! Instructions here.)

Exercises