This language is one of the branches of Mondi, an affiliate of Congo/Niger languages. The people speaking Soninke as their LI (native language) are scattered in Mali, Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania. Soninke serve as one of the native languages of each of these countries. Although, an accurate statistics of the population of Soninke in these countries is not available, the population is variously put at 1.5 and 2.5 million.

The Soninke people were the pillars of the 9th century Ghana Empire whose history first documented by Arab geographers and later recorded by historians. This empire was extended up to upper part of Niger and Timbuktu in the 10th century, the time when the empire was flourishing. Towards the end of the 11th century when the Murabituns captured the empire, the Soninke people embraced Islam. As a result, tons of Arabic words find their way into Soninke language and lastly, the Arabic script was used for writing the Soninke language.