What language would've been spoken in the Mali Empire

[anlogato]

This is a question I could never really find a good answer to. In general, would its founders have been speaking a Mande language still in use today?

[coleman]

The short answer is “Manding”.

Linguists would refer to this as “Proto-Manding” because it’s something that we have no documented evidence of, so its forms in terms of grammar and vocabulary are based on theorized reconstructions of the major living Manding varieties that we know today: Bambara, Jula, Maninka and Mandinka, etc.

The name “Manding” is slighly misleading because the name of the language itself in the language itself as the time was almost certainly: mandenkakan (< manden-ka-kan ‘language of the people of Manden’). This is the name from which the modern varieties such as “Maninka” (that is, “Manin-ka-kan”) and “Mandinka” (that is, “Mandin-ka-kan”) descend.

The so-called “Mali Empire” was, of course, a political formation that emerged from a region that in the language is called “Manden”.