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Eastern Maninka (autonymously Maninkakan) is a Manding language of the Mande branch of Niger-Congo, spoken by over 3 million people in Upper Guinea (Kankan, Faranah, Siguiri prefectures) and adjacent borderlands of Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Maninka is closely related to Bambara (bm) of Mali and the Mandinka of Senegambia — together forming the Manding dialect cluster. The Maninka are the modern descendants of the Mali Empire (c. 1235-1670) which dominated West Africa under emperors like Sundiata Keita and Mansa Musa. The 1949 invention of the N'Ko alphabet by Solomana Kanté specifically for Manding languages was an explicit reaction against the use of foreign scripts (Arabic and Latin) for African languages, and N'Ko has growing popular use particularly in Guinea. Maninka is one of the most-vibrant African languages with intact intergenerational transmission and major literary production.