Maninka belongs to the Manding group of Mande languages, spoken across Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone in a chain of closely related varieties that speakers usually treat as one language with regional accents rather than as several languages. Its religious importance rests less on a written scripture than on a profession. The jeliw, the hereditary specialists English usually calls griots, are the custodians of genealogy, praise, historical narrative and the etiquette of formal speech, and their material is transmitted in Maninka within named lineages, of which the Kouyate and the Diabate are the best known.
The Sundiata epic, the account of the founder of the Mali empire, is their central work, and the version most read outside West Africa was set down from the recitation of Mamadou Kouyate. A jeli is not simply a performer. The office carries obligations of mediation and of restraint, the right to say to a patron what nobody else may say, and a corresponding bar on certain kinds of work, and the epic itself narrates the origin of the bond between the jeli lineages and the noble ones. Islam has been present in the Manding world for many centuries and the epic carries a layer of Muslim reference over an older stratum, so a recitation can invoke the pilgrimage of a Mali emperor in one line and a hunter's power in the next without treating the two as a contradiction.