belongs to the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo family.

spoken by 540 thousand people in Senegal, 400 thousand people in Gambia, and 137 thousand people in Guinea-Bissau.

Latin alphabet and Arabic alphabet-based orthographies are widely used for Mandinka; the former is official, but the latter is more widely used and older. In addition, the pan-Mandé writing system N'ko, invented in 1949, is sometimes used.

The Arabic script uses no extra letters (apart from, rarely, an extra vowel mark for e), but some of the letters are pronounced differently from in Arabic.