The goal of this study is to test instrumentally the hypothesis that Bambara disyllabic feet are distributed into three types. The results of the study can be summarised as follows: – reduction and elision of a short V1 in disyllabic feet is phonetic, rather than phonological, and can be explained by phonotactics. Therefore, disyllabic feet with a short first vowel form just one type; – V1 length, although phonologically relevant, displays some instability between speakers; – in a disyllabic foot (at least when its boundaries coincide with word boundaries), length characteristics are in complementary distribution: if the first vowel is short, the second is long, and if the first vowel is long, the second is short. This phenomenon can be defined as ‘foot isochrony’; – if the first vowel of a disyllabic foot is short, the duration of the second vowel depends on the position of the foot within the word: word-finally it is long, otherwise it is short; – the difference between disyllabic feet types in Bambara can be exhaustively described by means of the length of the first vowel; there seems to be no need to postulate the existence of stress.