Wolof (English pronunciation: /ˈwɒlɒf/,[2] /ˈwoʊlɒf/[3][4]) is a language of Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania, and the native language of the Wolof people. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, it belongs to the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo language family. Unlike most other languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, Wolof is not a tonal language. Wolof originated as the language of the Lebou people.[5][6] It 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[citation needed]. Wolof dialects vary geographically and between rural and urban areas. Dakar-Wolof, for instance, is an urban mixture of Wolof, French, and Arabic. Wolof is the standard spelling, and may refer to the Wolof people or to Wolof culture. Older French publications may use the spelling Ouolof, and some English publications Wollof, predominantly referring to (anglophone) Gambian Wolof. Prior to the 20th century, the forms Volof and Olof were used. Wolof words in English are believed to include yam, from Wolof nyami to eat food, nyam in Barbadian English [7] meaning to eat (also compare Seychellois nyanmnyanm, also meaning to eat [8] ).Geographical distribution[edit] States of the Wolof Empire Wolof is spoken by more than 10 million people and about 40 percent (approximately 5 million people) of Senegals 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 the 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, about 20-25 percent of the population speak Wolof as a first language, but Wolof 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. In Serrekunda, the Gambias largest town, although only a tiny minority are ethnic Wolofs, approximately 70 percent of the population speaks and/or understands Wolof. The official language of the Gambia is English; Mandinka (40 percent), Wolof (10 percent) and Fula (15 percent) are as yet not used in formal education. In Mauritania, about seven percent (approximately 185,000 people) of the population speak Wolof. There, the language is used only around the southern coastal regions. Mauritanias official language is Arabic; French is used as a lingua franca in addition to Wolof and Arabic. Classification[edit] Wolof is one of the Senegambian languages, which are characterized by consonant mutation. It is often said to be closely related to Fulani, because of a misreading by Wilson (1989) of the data in Sapir (1971) that have long been used to classify the Atlantic languages. However, Segerer (2009, 2010) confirms Sapirs findings that Wolof is not close to Fulani; he finds the closest relatives of Wolof are several obscure languages along the Casamance River.[9]Orthography and pronunciation[edit] Note: Phonetic transcriptions are printed between square brackets [] following the rules of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The Latin-based 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. Wolof is most often written in this orthography, in which phonemes have a clear one-to-one correspondence to graphemes. (A traditional Arabic-based transcription of Wolof called Wolofal dates back to the pre-colonial period and is still used by many people.) The first syllable of words is stressed; long vowels are pronounced with more time, but are not automatically stressed, as they are in English. Vowels[edit] Vowels Front Central Back short long short long short long Close i iː u uː Close-mid e eː o oː mid ə əː Open-mid ɛ ɛː ɔ ɔː Near-open ɐ Open ä äː Wolof adds diacritic marks to the vowel letters to distinguish between open and closed vowels. Example: o [ɔ] is open like Received Pronunciation often, ó [o] is closed similar to the o-sound in English most (but without the w-sound at the end). Similarly, e [ɛ] is open like English get, while é [e] is closed similar to the sound of a in English gate (but without the y-sound at the end). Single vowels are short, geminated vowels are long, so Wolof o [ɔ] is short and pronounced like ou in Received Pronunciation sought, but Wolof oo [ɔː] is long and pronounced like the aw in Received Pronunciation sawed. If a closed vowel is long, the diacritic symbol is usually written only above the first vowel, e.g. óo, but some sources deviate from this CLAD standard and set it above both vowels, e.g. óó. The letter a is pronounced [ɐ], similar to the vowel in Received Pronunciation cup, while the letter à is pronounced [ä], like a sound intermediate between the vowels in cat and father or like the sound of i in ride without the y-sound at the end. aa [äː] is the long counterpart of à, not a, which is always short. The very common Wolof letter ë is pronounced [ə], like a in English sofa. Consonants[edit] [icon] This section requires expansion. (October 2013) The characters (U+014B) Latin small letter eng ŋ and (U+014A) Latin capital letter eng Ŋ are used in the Wolof alphabet. They are pronounced [ŋ], like ng in English hang. The characters (U+00F1) Latin small letter n with tilde ñ and (U+00D1) Latin capital letter n with tilde Ñ are also used. They are pronounced [ɲ] like the same letter in Spanish señor. c [c] is somewhere between t and k, while j [ɟ] is between d and g. x [χ] is like ch in German Bach, while q [q] is like Literary Arabic qāf. g [ɡ] is always like g in English garden, and s [s] is always like s in English stop. w [w] is as in wind and y [j] as in yellow.Tones[edit] Unlike most sub-Saharan African languages, Wolof has no tones. Other non-tonal languages of Africa include Amharic, Swahili and Fula.Grammar[edit] Notable characteristics[edit] Pronoun conjugation instead of verbal conjugation[edit] In Wolof, verbs are unchangeable words which cannot be conjugated. To express different tenses or aspects of an action, the personal pronouns are conjugated - not the verbs. Therefore, the term temporal pronoun has become established for this part of speech. Example: The verb dem means to go and cannot be changed; 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[edit] In Wolof, tenses like present tense, past tense, and future tense are just of secondary importance, they even play almost no role. Of crucial importance is the aspect of an action from the speakers point of view. The most important distinction is whether an action is perfective, i.e., finished, or imperfective, i.e., still going on, from the speakers point of view, regardless 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 take place for sure, and whether an action wants to emphasize the role of the subject, predicate, or object of the sentence. As a result, conjugation is not done by tenses, but by aspects. Nevertheless, the term temporal pronoun became usual for these conjugated pronouns, although aspect pronoun might be a better term. 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. Now 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 go. If the speaker absolutely wants to express that an action took place in the past, this is not done by conjugation, but 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).Numerals[edit] Cardinal numbers[edit] The Wolof numeral system is based on the numbers 5 and 10. 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), ñett-fukk thirty (literally, three-ten). Alternatively, thirty is fanweer, which is roughly the number of days in a lunar month (literally fan is day and weer is moon.) 0 tus / neen / zéro [French] / sero / dara [nothing] 1 benn 2 ñaar / yaar 3 ñett / ñatt / yett / yatt 4 ñeent / ñenent 5 juróom 6 juróom-benn 7 juróom-ñaar 8 juróom-ñett 9 juróom-ñeent 10 fukk 11 fukk ak benn 12 fukk ak ñaar 13 fukk ak ñett 14 fukk ak ñeent 15 fukk ak juróom 16 fukk ak juróom-benn 17 fukk ak juróom-ñaar 18 fukk ak juróom-ñett 19 fukk ak juróom-ñeent 20 ñaar-fukk 26 ñaar-fukk ak juróom-benn 30 ñett-fukk / fanweer 40 ñeent-fukk 50 juróom-fukk 60 juróom-benn-fukk 66 juróom-benn-fukk ak juróom-benn 70 juróom-ñaar-fukk 80 juróom-ñett-fukk 90 juróom-ñeent-fukk 100 téeméer 101 téeméer ak benn 106 téeméer ak juróom-benn 110 téeméer ak fukk 200 ñaari téeméer 300 ñetti téeméer 400 ñeenti téeméer 500 juróomi téeméer 600 juróom-benni téeméer 700 juróom-ñaari téeméer 800 juróom-ñetti téeméer 900 juróom-ñeenti téeméer 1000 junni / junne 1100 junni ak téeméer 1600 junni ak juróom-benni téeméer 1945 junni ak juróom-ñeenti téeméer ak ñeent-fukk ak juróom 1969 junni ak juróom-ñeenti téeméer ak juróom-benn-fukk ak juróom-ñeent 2000 ñaari junni 3000 ñetti junni 4000 ñeenti junni 5000 juróomi junni 6000 juróom-benni junni 7000 juróom-ñaari junni 8000 juróom-ñetti junni 9000 juróom-ñeenti junni 10000 fukki junni 100000 téeméeri junni 1000000 tamndareet / million.Example phrases[edit] This paragraph uses the exact orthography developed by the CLAD institute, which can be found in Arame Fals dictionary (see bibliography below). For the literal translation, please note that Wolof does not have tenses in the sense of the Indo-European languages; rather, Wolof marks aspect and focus of an action. The literal translation given in the table below is an exact word-by-word translation in the original word order, where the meanings of the individual words are separated by dashes. To listen to the pronunciation of some Wolof words, click here [10] Wolof English Literal translation into English As-salamu alaykum ! Response: Maalekum salaam ! This an Arabic language greeting but is commonly used among Wolof speakers. Hello! Response: Hello! (Arabic) peace be with you Response: and with you be peace During conversation it is common to respond to comments with the Arabic Alhamdulillah.[citation needed] Praise to God! Na nga def ? / Naka nga def ? / Noo def? Response: Maa ngi fi rekk How do you do? / How are you doing? Response: I am fine How - you (already) - do Response: I here - be - here - only Naka mu ? Response: Maa ngi fi Whats up? Response: Im fine How is it? Response: Im here Numu demee? / Naka mu demee?/ Response: Nice / Mu ngi dox Hows it going? Response: Fine / Nice / Its going How is it going? Response: Nice (from English) / Its walking (going) Lu bees ? Response: Dara (beesul) Whats new? Response: Nothing (is new) What is it that is new? Response: Nothing/something (is not new) Ba beneen (yoon). See you soon (next time) Until - other - (time) Jërëjëf Thanks / Thank you It was worth it Waaw Yes Yes Déedéet No No Fan la ... am ? Where is a ...? Where - that which is - ... - existing/having Fan la fajkat am ? Where is a physician/doctor? Where - the one who is - heal-maker - existing/having Fan la ... nekk ? Where is the ...? Where - it which is - ... - found? Ana ...? Where is ...? Where is ...? Ana loppitaan bi? Where is the hospital? Where is - hospital - the? Noo tudd(a)* ? / Naka nga tudd(a) ? Response: ... laa tudd(a) / Maa ngi tudd(a) ... (* Gambian Wolof has an after word-ending doubled consonants ) What is your name? Response: My name is .... What you (already) - being called? Response: ... I (objective) - called / I am called ..
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 19:02:26 +0000
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