Spoken in Mali, Bambara is a language also spoken in Burkina Faso, and Senegal to a lesser extent. It serves as a lingua franca in Mali where 80 percent of the people speak it as a first or second language. It uses seven vowels a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ and u. Although written literature is only slowly evolving (due to the predominance of French as the "language of the educated"), there exists a wealth of oral literature, which is often tales of kings and heroes.