This was asked by @gregorio in the Discord server, but it’s very substantive so I am taking the liberty of responding here :
Question: what exactly is the meaning/status of “Pure Manding” in contrast to Frenchified/Arabicized Manding?
Several times now I’ve asked what a word means to a (usually young and educated) Bambara speaker and they would say “oh that’s pure Bambara, but we really usually use this other French word (or sometimes Arabic word) in its place”.
This indicates to me that
(1) there’s this sort of “original” lexicon in the eyes of Bambara speakers and
(2) everyone knows the pure-lexicon but doesn’t prefer to use.I’m familiar of writers from 13th century England decrying how everyone was using Norman-French terms in place of Anglo-Saxon equivalents but I wasn’t sure how far to press the comparison.
Same is also happening in Norwegian with English loan words but to a lesser degree.
Good observation and question!
If by “status”, you mean an official one, then, well, there isn’t one really beyond look to dictionaries as authorities on what words are considered to be sufficiently “Bambara” (or sufficiently integrated into Bambara [regardless of their origin]), etc.
If by “status”, you mean what it is the situation, then, well, it’s basically a complex sociolinguistic reality.
In short, I’d say that there is a large amount of French loanwords, French nonce borrowings and code-switching into French in the speech of almost all Manding speakers. This occurs in almost all contexts but it’s more pronounced in more urban settings and in “formal” socio-economic spheres such as law, education, politics, etc., since they are all officially conducted in French.
The point is that when people are speaking “Bambara”, you hear tons of French. This is not dissimilar to all the English that one hears in the speech of French, German and, as you point out, Norwegian speakers, etc. The main difference is that most French and German speakers, etc., read and consume audio and video media content that is oftentimes much more likely to have little to no English. They can often “turn off” anglicisms much more easily, whereas in Manding language varieties, it can be very difficult. In fact, a popular radio/TV show segment competition is to have people try to speak as long as possible with no French in it.
Like in any language, people often make metalinguistic judgements about what they consider “authentic”, “true”, “pure”, “correct” or “real” forms. So, yes, I’m not surprised that people would say “That’s pure Bambara” when you ask a question. It happens all the time. For instance, if you say this:
N ma kɔrɔtɔ
“I am not in a hurry”
Everyone would understand it and you do certainly hear it. But you are probably way more likely to hear the following using the French verb loanword presser:
N ma perese
/
N ma “presser”“I am not in a hurry”
Why do people opt for a French loanword when a perfectly good Bambara verb exists that basically mean 100% the same thing and linguistically functions the same way? Every instance can be explained on a individual level, but in general, the answer has something to do not with what the French loanwords means but rather what it indexes or points to. And that would be something like “modernity”, “being cool”, “being educated”, etc. Though in some cases, the use becomes so banal that nobody thinks of it all anymore and it actually just becomes the de facto standard and then the Bambara verb kɔrɔtɔ starts to index something else: “being old”, “being a traditionalist”, “being cool but in a dorky way”, “being anti-French”, “being a student of AKT”, etc. 
If you are really curious, there’s a series of references (and some of my thinking about the matter), in my dissertation (see the section “Manding Sociolinguistics” starting on page 6 for starters).
Terrifying!