Coleman Donaldson

I want it to be as easy and normal to learn African languages as Western languages like French or English so I made a full online beginner's class for Bambara/Dioula: ankataa.com/course

Cool to see how "Artificial Intelligence" is translated in Bambara by @RFI_Ma: "Hakili duman dilannen" = Lit. 'Constructed Nice Intellect' :-)

After greetings, people find it helpful to know how to say basics like "yes", "no" and "excuse me", etc., so I made a whole video about essential expressions for Maninka (AKA "Malinké") learners :-) youtu.be/R4tzQQXXk04

@zenodotus I ni ke!

Just called my Jakhanke teacher from Peace Corps Senegal from 30 years ago. I fumbled some words but mostly got my message across.

I’ll be teaching a small set of live online Bambara/Jula courses starting in Feb: - Beginner – Wed, 14h30 Paris / 8:30am ET - Adv. Beginner – Wed, 17h Paris / 11am ET - Adv. Beginner Conversation – Wed, 19h Paris / 1pm ET Interested? Let me know!

I can't code but I can blog so this is what I do

Just spent way too long updating my write-up documenting Manding language tech initiatives (datasets, models, apps) etc., that can do thing like translate, convert text to speech or transcribe speech to text ankataa.com/blog/2024/6/27…

Writing Timbuktu: The book in West African History (@PrincetonUPress) by Shamil Jeppie is here, and warms my heart to see the work of my late and dearest colleague Abdal-Aziz Batran in the bibliography.

I almost feel like an employed academic linguist haha

Like this one!

I put together a new AKT corpus for myself! It's got ~5 hours of spoken Bambara/Jula, with 210+ speakers across 30 "An ka taa" videos. That's 6.5k subtitle units which break down into 75k+ word & punctuation tokens :-)

You can use it too! It's free! dictionary.ankataa.com

Over 1,600 people used the Bambara/Dioula-English-French dictionary more than 2,300 times last month! The top English search terms were: 1. hairy 2. fog 3. life 4. love 5. find

I know why but it's still always striking how the term "mother tongue" or "native language" is used in West African diaspora contexts to mean not one's first language but literally the language of one's parents or ancestors (that the person often doesn't speak)

@BridgesFromBKO Good catch, karamɔgɔ -- yes, in an ideal world, I would be going through all the search terms and making updates every month or year, but thus far, no time 😭

@DonaldsonCD But there is still no entry for "hairy" in the Bambara dictionary :(

The Bambara/Dioula-English-French dictionary was used by over 1,200 people last month. The top English search terms were: 1. hairy 2. bridge 3. food 4. red 5. last name

You can use it too! It's free! dictionary.ankataa.com

I interviewed and made a video about my friend and colleague Youssouf who is a Bambara/Dioula language teacher with his own African language school in Abijan :-) youtube.com/watch?v=S0iFmI…

@tiramisu_2025 Echt? I never had that issue at Uni Hamburg as I recall

A student asked me about Bambara language movies so I finally got around to doing a little write-up with links, etc :-) ankataa.com/blog/2025/12/1…