Wolof ( ; , ) is a Niger–Congo language spoken by the Wolof people in much of the West African subregion of Senegambia that is split between the countries of Senegal, the Gambia and Mauritania. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, it belongs to the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo language family. Unlike most other languages of its family, Wolof is not a tonal 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. 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 , , or , 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 , used also in Spanish: as an onomatopoeia for eating or chewing, in several Caribbean English Creoles meaning 'to eat' (compare Seychellois Creole , also meaning 'to eat').Danielle D'Offay & Guy Lionet, Diksyonner Kreol-Franse / Dictionnaire Créole Seychellois – Français, Helmut Buske Verlag, Hamburg, 1982. In all fairness, the word might as easily be from Fula , "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.

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.Hammarström (2015) Ethnologue 16/17/18th editions: a comprehensive review: online appendices

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.Dieng, A. A. (2024). Urban Wolof across borders: Translanguaging while transmigrating. Palgrave Macmillan.

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:Unseth, 2009.

+Vowels Front Central Back short long short long short long Close Close-mid mid Open-mid Open

All vowels may be long (written double) or short.Long ëë is rare (Torrence 2013:10). When and 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,Torrence 2013:11

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 in,

where harmony would predict *. 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:Omar Ka, 1994, Wolof Phonology and Morphology + Wolof consonants Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal Nasal Or in some texts. Plosive prenasalized voiced voiceless Fricative ~ Trill Approximant

All simple nasals, oral stops apart from and , and the sonorants may be geminated (doubled), though geminate only occurs in ideophones.Pape Amadou Gaye, Practical Cours in / Cours Practique en Wolof: An Audio–Aural Approach.Some are restricted or rare, and sources disagree about this. Torrence (2013) claims that all consonants but prenasalized stops may be geminate, while Diouf (2009) does not list the fricatives, q, or r y w, and does not recognize glottal stop in the inventor. The differences may be dialectical or because some sounds are rare. (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:Diouf (2009)

– – – – – – – – – – –

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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . The letters , , and 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.

+ Wolof Latin alphabet () () ()

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.

+ Wolofal (Arabic) alphabetCurrah, Galien (26 August 2015) ORTHOGRAPHE WOLOFAL. Link (Archive) / ~ ~ ~ ~ + Vowel at the beginning of a word Short Vowels Long Vowels + Vowel at the middle or end of a word ∅ Short Vowels Long Vowels

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 means and does not change; the temporal pronoun means ; the temporal pronoun means . With that, the following sentences can be built now: –

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 means ; the temporal pronoun means , the temporal pronoun means ; the temporal pronoun means . The following sentences can be constructed: – –

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

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 or are often added to words like and 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 is often used as a generic article when the actual article is not known.

Any loan noun from French or English uses : , .

Most Arabic or religious terms use : , .

Four nouns referring to persons use /: , .

Plural nouns use : , .

Miscellaneous articles: , , , , .

Numerals

Cardinal numbers