It is used in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and some other West African countries, primarily, but not exclusively, in written form, whereas in speech the different varieties of Manding are used: Maninka, Bambara, Dyula and others.
[1][2][3][4] Valentin Vydrin in 1999[5] and Coleman Donaldson in 2019[3] indicated that the popularity of writing Manding languages in the standardized N'Ko form is growing.
[7] The standard strives to represent all Manding languages in a way that attempts to show a common "proto-Manding" phonology and the words' etymology, including when the actual pronunciation in modern spoken varieties is significantly different.
For example, the word for "name" in Bambara is [tɔɡɔ] and in Maninka it is [tɔɔ], but the standard written N'Ko form is ߕߐ߮ tô.
In written communication each person will write it in a single unified way using the N'Ko script, and yet read and pronounce it as in their own linguistic variety.