Mali Empire
Etymology of Mali

Mali, Mandé, Manden, and Manding are all various pronunciations of the same word across different languages and dialects. The version recorded by medieval Arab geographers is Mali (Arabic: مالي, romanized: Mālī). Mali is the Fula form of the word. In the Manding languages, the modern descendants of the language spoken at the core of the Mali Empire, Manden or Manding is the name of the region corresponding to the heartland of the Mali Empire.

Medieval sources are divided over whether Mali is the name of a town or a region. Ibn Battuta who visited the capital city from 1352 to 1353, called it Mali. The 1375 Catalan Atlas portrayed a "city of Melly" (Catalan: ciutat de Melly) in West Africa. Leo Africanus said that the capital city was called Melli. However, Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari gives Mali as the name of the capital province and Ibn Khaldun refers to Mali as a people, with each giving different names for the capital city itself. Whether Mali originated as the name of a town or region, the name was subsequently applied to the entire empire ruled from Mali.

Another hypothesis suggests that the name Mali is derived from Mandé mali " hippopotamus ", an animal that had special significance to the Keitas, and that Mandé means "little manatee". A legend claims that Sunjata transformed into a hippopotamus. However, these hypotheses have been rejected by locals and are inconsistent with the apparent cognate status of Mali and Mandé.
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