Wolof language

Wolof(/ˈwoʊlɒf/WOH-lof;Wolof làkk,وࣷلࣷفْ لࣵکّ) is aNiger–Congolanguage spoken by theWolof peoplein much of theWest Africansubregion ofSenegambiathat is split between the countries ofSenegal,The GambiaandMauritania. Like the neighbouring languagesSererandFula, it belongs to theSenegambian branchof the Niger–Congo language family. Unlike most other languages of its family, Wolof is not atonal language.
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.Wolofdialectsvary geographically and between rural and urban areas. The principal dialect ofDakar, for instance, is an urban mixture of Wolof,French, andArabic.
Wolofis the standard spelling and may also refer to the Wolof ethnicity or culture. Variants include the older FrenchOuolof,Jollof, orJolof, which now typically refers either to theJolof Empireor tojollof rice, a common West African rice dish. Now-archaic forms includeVolofandOlof.
Englishis believed to have adopted some Wolofloanwords, such asbanana, viaSpanishorPortuguese,andnyam, used also in Spanish: 'ñam' as an onomatopoeia for eating or chewing,  in severalCaribbean English Creolesmeaning "to eat" (compareSeychellois Creolenyanmnyanm, also meaning "to eat").
Wolof is spoken by more than 10 million people and about 40 percent (approximately 5 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 acquiredlanguage. In the whole region fromDakartoSaint-Louis, and also west and southwest ofKaolack, 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 isFrench.
InThe Gambia, although about 20–25 percent of the population speak Wolof as a first language, it has a disproportionate influence because of its prevalence inBanjul, the Gambian capital, where 75 percent of the population use it as a first language. Furthermore, inSerekunda, The Gambia's largest town, although only a tiny minority are ethnic Wolofs, approximately 70 percent of the population speaks or understands Wolof.
InMauritania, 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.
Wolof is one of theSenegambian languages, which are characterized byconsonant mutation.It is often said to be closely related to theFula languagebecause of a misreading by Wilson (1989) of the data in Sapir (1971) that have long been used to classify the Atlantic languages.
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.
The vowels are as follows:
There may be an additional low vowel, or this may be confused with orthographicà.
All vowels may be long (written double) or short./aː/is written⟨à⟩before a long (prenasalized or geminate) consonant (examplelàmbi"arena"). Whenéandóare written double, the accent mark is often only on the first letter.
Vowels fall into twoharmonizingsets according toATR:i u é ó ëare +ATR,e o aare the −ATR analogues ofé ó ë.  For example,
There are no −ATR analogs of the high vowelsi u. 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,
where harmony would predict*door-u-më-léén-fë.
That is,I or Ubehave 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 in word-initial position are as follows:
All simple nasals, oral stops apart fromqand glottal, and the sonorantsl r y wmay begeminated(doubled), though geminateronly occurs inideophones.(Geminate consonants are written double.)Qis inherently geminate and may occur in an initial position; otherwise, geminate consonants and consonant clusters, includingnt, nc, nk, nq([ɴq]), are restricted to word-medial and -final position.  In the final place, geminate consonants may be followed by a faintepentheticschwavowel.
Of the consonants in the chart above,p d c kdo not occur in the intermediate or final position, being replaced byf r sand zero, though geminatepp dd cc kkare common. Phoneticp c kdo occur finally, but only as allophones ofb j gdue tofinal devoicing.
Minimal pairs:
Unlike most sub-Saharan African languages, Wolof has notones. Other non-tonal languages of sub-Saharan Africa includeAmharic,SwahiliandFula.
Note:Phonetic transcriptions are printed betweensquare brackets[]following the rules of theInternational Phonetic Alphabet(IPA).
TheLatinorthography of Wolof inSenegalwas 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 whichphonemeshave a clear one-to-one correspondence tographemes. 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.
TheArabic-based script of Wolof, referred to asWolofal, 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, analphabeticscript invented by Assane Faye in 1961, which has been adopted by a small number of Wolof speakers.
The first syllable of words isstressed; long vowels are pronounced with more time but are not automatically stressed, as they are in English.
In Wolof, verbs are unchangeable stems that cannot be conjugated. To express different tenses or aspects of an action, personal pronouns are conjugated – not the verbs. Therefore, the termtemporal pronounhas become established for this part of speech. It is also referred to as a focus form.
Example: The verbdemmeans "to go" and cannot be changed; the temporal pronounmaa ngimeans "I/me, here and now"; the temporal pronoundinaameans "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)."
In Wolof, tenses like present tense, past tense, and future tense are just of secondary importance and play almost no role. Of crucial importance is the aspect of action from the speaker's point of view. The most vital 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 termtemporal pronounis usual for such conjugated pronouns althoughaspect pronounmight be a better term.
For example, the verbdemmeans "to go"; the temporal pronounnaameans "I already/definitely", the temporal pronoundinaameans "I am soon / I will soon / I will be soon"; the temporal pronoundamaymeans "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)oonto 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."
Wolof has two main verb classes:dynamicandstative. Verbs are not inflected; instead pronouns are used to mark person, aspect, tense, and focus.
Wolof does not mark natural gender asgrammatical gender: there is one pronoun encompassing the English 'he', 'she', and 'it'. The descriptorsbu góor(male / masculine) orbu jigéen(female / feminine) are often added to words likexarit, 'friend', andrakk, '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-biis often used as a generic article when the actual article is not known.
Any loan noun from French or English uses-bi: butik-bi, xarit-bi"the boutique, the friend."
Most Arabic or religious terms use-Ji: Jumma-Ji, jigéen-ji, "the mosque, the girl."
Four nouns referring to persons use-ki/-ñi: nit-ki, nit-ñi, "the person, the people"
Plural nouns use-yi: jigéen-yi, butik-yi, "the girls, the boutiques"
Miscellaneous articles: "si, gi, wi, mi, li."
The Wolof numeral system is based on the numbers 5 (quinary) and 10 (decimal). It is extremely regular in formation, comparable toChinese. 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" isfanweer, which is roughly the number of days in a lunar month (literally "fan" is day and "weer" is moon.)
Ordinal numbers(first, second, third, etc.) are formed by adding the ending–éél(pronounced ayl) to thecardinal number.
For example, two isñaarand second isñaaréél
The one exception to this system is "first", which isbu njëk(or the adapted French wordpremier:përëmye)
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.
TheNew Testamentwas translated into Wolof and published in 1987, second edition 2004, and in 2008 with some minor typographical corrections.
Boubacar Boris Dioppublished his novelDoomi Goloin Wolof in 2002.
The 1994 song "7 Seconds" byYoussou N'DourandNeneh Cherryis partially sung in Wolof.
In his 1865 collection of West African proverbs,Wit and Wisdom from West Africa,Richard Francis Burtonincluded a selection of over 200 Wolof proverbs in both Wolof and English translationdrawn fromJean Dard'sGrammaire Wolofeof 1826.Here are some of those proverbs:
In the appendix to hisFolktales 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 hisGrammaire de la Langue Woloffepublished 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 TalibébyLilyan Kestelootand 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.
Article 1 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights