The Bwa languages are a branch of the Gur languages

Gur languages

The Gur languages, also known as Central Gur, belong to the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 70 languages belonging to this group. They are spoken in Burkina Faso, southern Mali, northeastern Côte d'Ivoire, northern Ghana, northern Togo, northwestern Benin, and southwestern Niger.Like most...

 spoken by over half a million Bwa people of Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso – also known by its short-form name Burkina – is a landlocked country in west Africa. It is surrounded by six countries: Mali to the north, Niger to the east, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana to the south, and Côte d'Ivoire to the southwest.Its size is with an estimated...

 and Mali

Mali

Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...

.

The Bwa people, and their languages, are one of several called Bobo

Bobo people

The Bobo are an ethnic group living in Burkina Faso although the area occupied by the Bobo extends north into Mali. In much of the literature on African art the group that lives in the area of Bobo-Dioulasso is called Bobo-Fing, literally 'black Bobo.' These people call themselves Bobo, and they...

 (Bobo Wule/Oule = Red Bobo) in Bambara

Bambara language

Bambara, more correctly known as Bamanankan , its designation in the language itself , is a language spoken in Mali by as many as six million people...

. The languages are not mutually intelligible; Ethnologue calculates that the intelligibility of the Ouarkoye and Cwi is 30%, though other varieties are closer.