Wolof language · Lablypedia

Wolof is the most widely spoken language in Senegal, spoken natively by the Wolof people (40% of the population) but also by most other Senegalese as a second language. Wolof dialects vary geographically and between rural and urban areas. The principal dialect of Dakar, for instance, is an urban mixture of Wolof, French, and Arabic.

Wolof is the standard spelling and may also refer to the Wolof ethnicity or culture. Variants include the older French Ouolof, Jollof, or Jolof, which now typically refers either to the Jolof Empire or to jollof rice. Now-archaic forms include Volof and Olof.

English is believed to have adopted some Wolof loanwords, such as banana, via Spanish or Portuguese, and nyam, used also in Spanish: ñam as an onomatopoeia for eating or chewing, in several Caribbean English Creoles meaning 'to eat' (compare Seychellois Creole nyanmnyanm, also meaning 'to eat').

Geographical distribution

Wolof is spoken by 18 million people and about 40% (8.2 million people) of Senegal's population speak Wolof as their native language. Increased mobility, and especially the growth of the capital Dakar, created the need for a common language: today, an additional 40 percent of the population speak Wolof as a second or acquired language. In the whole region from Dakar to Saint-Louis, and also west and southwest of Kaolack, Wolof is spoken by the vast majority of people. Typically when various ethnic groups in Senegal come together in cities and towns, they speak Wolof. It is therefore spoken in almost every regional and departmental capital in Senegal. Nevertheless, the official language of Senegal is French.

In the Gambia, although about 20–25 percent of the population speak Wolof as a first language, it has a disproportionate influence because of its prevalence in Banjul, the Gambian capital, where 75 percent of the population use it as a first language. Furthermore, in Serekunda, the Gambia's largest town, although only a tiny minority are ethnic Wolofs, approximately 70 percent of the population speaks or understands Wolof.

In Mauritania, about seven percent of the population (approximately 185,000 people) speak Wolof. Most live near or along the Senegal River that Mauritania shares with Senegal.

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Classification

Wolof is one of the Senegambian languages, which are characterized by consonant mutation. It is often said to be closely related to the Fula language because of a misreading by Wilson (1989) of the data in Sapir (1971) that have long been used to classify the Atlantic languages.

Varieties

Senegalese/Mauritanian Wolof and Gambian Wolof are distinct national standards: they use different orthographies and use different languages (French vs. English) as their source for technical loanwords. However, both the spoken and written languages are mutually intelligible. Lebu Wolof, on the other hand, is incomprehensible to standard Wolof speakers, a distinction that has been obscured because all Lebu speakers are bilingual in standard Wolof.

Other types of varieties include what scholars have come to call urban Wolof. Urban Wolof is a dynamic, contact-based variety of Wolof that has developed in major urban centres of Senegal. It integrates linguistic resources from Wolof, French and other languages, functioning as a flexible repertoire rather than a fixed mixed language.

In Senegal, it is strongly associated with Dakar and other cities, where it is used in markets, transport, work, schools, and digital communication. Outside Senegal, Urban Wolof circulates within the diaspora, especially in Europe and North America, where it interacts with English and other migrant repertoires to form new diasporic styles.

Phonology

Vowels

The vowels are as follows:

All vowels may be long (written double) or short. When ⟨é⟩ and ⟨ó⟩ are written double, the accent mark is often only on the first letter.

Vowels fall into two harmonizing sets according to ATR: are +ATR, are the −ATR analogues of . For example,

Lekk-oon

eat-PAST

ngeen

FIN.2PL

'You (plural) ate.'

Dóor-óon

hit-PAST

ngéen

FIN.2PL

'You (plural) hit.'

There are no −ATR analogs of the high vowels . They trigger +ATR harmony in suffixes when they occur in the root, but in a suffix, they may be transparent to vowel harmony.

The vowels of some suffixes or enclitics do not harmonize with preceding vowels. In most cases following vowels harmonize with them. That is, they reset the harmony, as if they were a separate word. However, when a suffix/clitic contains a high vowel (+ATR) that occurs after a −ATR root, any further suffixes harmonize with the root. That is, the +ATR suffix/clitic is "transparent" to vowel harmony. An example is the negative -u- in,

Door-u-ma

begin-NEG-1SG

leen

3PL

LOC

'I did not begin them there.'

where harmony would predict *door-u-më-léén-fë. That is, and behave as if they are their own −ATR analogs.

Authors differ in whether they indicate vowel harmony in writing, as well as whether they write clitics as separate words.

Consonants

Consonants in word-initial position are as follows:

All simple nasals, oral stops apart from and , and the sonorants may be geminated (doubled), though geminate only occurs in ideophones. (Geminate consonants are written double.) is inherently geminate and may occur in an initial position; otherwise, geminate consonants and consonant clusters, including and (), are restricted to word-medial and -final position. In the final place, geminate consonants may be followed by a faint epenthetic schwa vowel.

Of the consonants in the chart above, do not occur in the intermediate or final position, being replaced by and zero, though geminate are common. Phonetic do occur finally, but only as allophones of due to final devoicing.

Minimal pairs:

bët 'eye' – bëtt 'to find'
boy 'to catch fire' – boyy 'to be glimmering'
dag 'a royal servant' – dagg 'to cut'
dëj 'funeral' – dëjj 'cunt'
fen 'to (tell a) lie' – fenn 'somewhere, nowhere'
gal 'white gold' – gall 'to regurgitate'
goŋ 'baboon' – goŋŋ 'a kind of bed'
gëm 'to believe' – gëmm 'to close one's eyes'
Jaw 'family name' – jaww 'heaven'
nëb 'rotten' – nëbb 'to hide'
woñ 'thread' – woññ 'to count'

Tones

Unlike most sub-Saharan African languages, Wolof has no tones. Other non-tonal languages of sub-Saharan Africa include Amharic, Swahili and Fula.

Orthography

The Latin orthography of Wolof in Senegal was set by government decrees between 1971 and 1985. The language institute "Centre de linguistique appliquée de Dakar" (CLAD) is widely acknowledged as an authority when it comes to spelling rules for Wolof. The complete alphabet is A, À, B, C, D, E, É, Ë, F, G, I, J, K, L, M, N, Ñ, Ŋ, O, Ó, P, Q, R, S, T, U, W, X, Y. The letters H, V, and Z are only used in foreign words.

Wolof is most often written in this orthography, in which phonemes have a clear one-to-one correspondence to graphemes. Table below is the Wolof Latin alphabet and the corresponding phoneme. Highlighted letters are only used for loanwords and are not included in native Wolof words.

The Arabic-based script of Wolof, referred to as Wolofal, was set by the government as well, between 1985 and 1990, although never adopted by a decree, as the effort by the Senegalese ministry of education was to be part of a multi-national standardization effort. This alphabet has been used since pre-colonial times, as the first writing system to be adopted for Wolof, and is still used by many people, mainly Imams and their students in Quranic and Islamic schools.

Additionally, another script exists: Garay, an alphabetic script invented by Assane Faye in 1961, which has been adopted by a small number of Wolof speakers.

The first syllable of words is stressed; long vowels are pronounced with more time but are not automatically stressed, as they are in English.

Grammar

Notable characteristics

Pronoun conjugation instead of verbal conjugation

In Wolof, verbs are unchangeable stems that are not conjugated. To express different tenses or aspects of an action, personal pronouns are conjugated – rather than verbs. Therefore, the term temporal pronoun has become established for this part of speech. It is also referred to as a focus form.

Example: The verb dem means 'to go' and does not change; the temporal pronoun maa ngi means 'I/me, here and now'; the temporal pronoun dinaa means 'I am soon/I will soon/I will be soon'. With that, the following sentences can be built now: Maa ngi dem. 'I am going (here and now).' – Dinaa dem. 'I will go (soon).'

Conjugation with respect to aspect instead of tense

In the Wolof verb, the idea of grammatical tenses like present tense, past tense, and future tense are of secondary importance. Instead, crucial importance is placed on grammatical aspect, which expresses a view of the action from the speaker's point of view. A central distinction is whether an action is perfective (finished) or imperfective (still going on from the speaker's point of view), regardless of whether the action itself takes place in the past, present, or future. Other aspects indicate whether an action takes place regularly, whether an action will surely take place and whether an actor wants to emphasize the role of the subject, predicate, or object. As a result, conjugation is done by not tense but aspect. Nevertheless, the term temporal pronoun is usual for such conjugated pronouns although aspect pronoun might be a better term.

For example, the verb dem means 'to go'; the temporal pronoun naa means 'I already/definitely', the temporal pronoun dinaa means 'I am soon / I will soon / I will be soon'; the temporal pronoun damay means 'I (am) regularly/usually'. The following sentences can be constructed: Dem naa. 'I go already / I have already gone.' – Dinaa dem. 'I will go soon / I am just going to go.' – Damay dem. 'I usually/regularly/normally/am about to go.'

A speaker may express that an action absolutely took place in the past by adding the suffix -(w)oon to the verb (in a sentence, the temporal pronoun is still used in a conjugated form along with the past marker):

Demoon naa Ndakaaru. 'I already went to Dakar.'

Action verbs versus static verbs and adjectives

Wolof has two main verb classes: dynamic and stative. Verbs are not inflected; instead pronouns are used to mark person, aspect, tense, and focus.

Consonant harmony

Gender

Wolof does not mark natural gender as grammatical gender: there is one pronoun encompassing the English 'he', 'she', and 'it'. The descriptors bu góor 'male / masculine' or bu jigéen 'female / feminine' are often added to words like xarit 'friend' and rakk 'younger sibling' to indicate the person's sex.

Markers of noun definiteness (usually called "definite articles") agree with the noun they modify. There are at least ten articles in Wolof, some of them indicating a singular noun, others a plural noun. In Urban Wolof, spoken in large cities like Dakar, the article -bi is often used as a generic article when the actual article is not known.

Any loan noun from French or English uses -bi: butik-bi 'the boutique', xarit-bi 'the friend'.

Most Arabic or religious terms use -ji: Jumma-ji 'the mosque', jigéen-ji 'the girl'.

Four nouns referring to persons use -ki/-ñi: nit-ki 'the person', nit-ñi 'the people'.

Plural nouns use -yi: jigéen-yi 'the girls', butik-yi 'the boutiques'.

Miscellaneous articles: si, gi, wi, mi, li.

Numerals

Cardinal numbers

The Wolof numeral system is based on the numbers 5 (quinary) and 10 (decimal). It is extremely regular in formation, comparable to Chinese. Example: benn 'one', juróom 'five', juróom-benn 'six' (literally, 'five-one'), fukk 'ten', fukk ak juróom benn 'sixteen' (literally, 'ten and five one'), ñent-fukk 'forty' (literally, 'four-ten'). Alternatively, "thirty" is fanweer, which is roughly the number of days in a lunar month (literally fan is 'day' and weer is 'moon').

Ordinal numbers

Ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc.) are formed by adding the ending -éél to the cardinal number.

For example, two is ñaar and second is ñaaréél.

The one exception to this system is "first", which is bu njëk (or the adapted French word premier: përëmye).

Personal pronouns

Temporal pronouns

Conjugation of the temporal pronouns

In urban Wolof, it is common to use the forms of the 3rd person plural also for the 1st person plural.

It is also important to note that the verb follows specific temporal pronouns and precedes others.

Examples

Sample phrases

Literature

The New Testament was translated into Wolof and published in 1987, second edition 2004, and in 2008 with some minor typographical corrections.

Boubacar Boris Diop published his novel Doomi Golo in Wolof in 2002.

The 1994 song "7 Seconds" by Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry is partially sung in Wolof.

Oral literature

In his 1865 collection of West African proverbs, Wit and Wisdom from West Africa, Richard Francis Burton included a selection of over 200 Wolof proverbs in both Wolof and English translation drawn from Jean Dard's Grammaire Wolofe of 1826. Here are some of those proverbs:

Jalele sainou ane na ainou guissetil dara, tey mague dieki thy soufe guissa yope. 'The child looks everywhere and often sees nought, but the old man, sitting on the ground, sees everything.' (#2)
Poudhie ou naigue de na jaija ah taw, tey sailo yagoul. 'The roof fights with the rain, but he who is sheltered ignores it.' (#8)
Sopa bour ayoul, wandy bour bou la sopa a ko guenne. 'To love the king is not bad, but a king who loves you is better.' (#16)
Lou mpithie nana, nanetil nane ou gneye. 'The bird can drink much, but the elephant drinks more.' (#68)

Birago Diop based his Tales of Amadou Koumba on oral tales from Wolof griots.

In the appendix to his Folktales from the Gambia, Emil Magel, a professor of African literature and of Swahili, included the Wolof text of the story of "The Donkeys of Jolof" (Fari Mbam Ci Rew i Jolof) accompanied by an English translation.

In his Grammaire de la Langue Woloffe published in 1858, David Boilat, a Senegalese writer and missionary, included a selection of Wolof proverbs, riddles and folktales accompanied by French translations.

Du Tieddo au Talibé by Lilyan Kesteloot and Bassirou Dieng, published in 1989, is a collection of traditional tales in Wolof with French translations. The stories come from the Wolof monarchies that ruled Senegal from the 13th to the beginning of the 20th century.

Sample text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Bul ma sene, bul ma gis madi rey nga fokni mane
Xamuma li nekk ci sama suuf ak ci ginaw
Bëgguma ku ma xol dal diné yaw li nekk ci yaw
Mu ne ci mane, li ne ci mane moye dilene jàppale.

Translation:

Don’t see me from a distance, don’t look at my smile and think that I
Don’t know what’s under and behind me
I don’t want you to look at me and think what’s in you
Is in me, what’s in me is to help them

Jalele sainu ane na ainu gise til dara, tey mag jékki ci suuf gisa yëpp.
Puji u naige de na jaija ah taw, tey sailo yagul.
Sopa bur ayul, wandy bur bu la sopa a ko genne.
Lu mpiccie nana, nanetil nane u ñey.