Journal articles: 'Wolof language'

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Al-Ajrami, Muna Aljhaj-Saleh Salama. "The Impact of Arabic on Wolof Language." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 6, no. 4 (2016): 675. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0604.03.

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This research aims to study Wolof people in terms of their origin, background, and language. It will also discuss the factors that led Arabic to spread among the members of this tribe, such as the religious factor after the spreading of Islam in the West of Africa (i.e. Mauritania, Senegal, and Gambia), where Wolof people reside. The commercial factor also affected the spreading of Arabic language in the aforementioned areas. In addition to that, the emigration factor of some Arab tribes from Egypt and the Arab peninsula that resided in the far west of Africa for economic and political reasons had an impact on the spreading. Finally, the study will show the impact of Arabic Language on Wolof Language as the following: 1) the Arabic phonetics and their alternatives in this language; 2) the borrowed vocabulary in Wolof language from Arabic; and 3) Conduct a contrastive analysis in verb conjugation, masculinity and femininity, and definiteness and indefiniteness between the two languages to know how far Arabic Language has impacted Wolof Language.

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Meechan, Marjory, and Shana Poplack. "Orphan categories in bilingual discourse: Adjectivization strategies in Wolof-French and Fongbe-French." Language Variation and Change 7, no. 2 (1995): 169–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500000971.

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ABSTRACTWhen one language has a grammatical category that is rare or lacking in another, this “orphan” category may constrain the types of structures employed when the two languages are combined in bilingual discourse. We systematically examine the effect of categorial nonequivalence on language mixture in two corpora of spontaneous bilingual speech—Wolof—French and Fongbe—French—exhibiting different typological contrasts in adjectival modification structures. Focusing on lone French-origin items in otherwise Wolof or Fongbe discourse, the most frequent, if the most contentious, type of intrasentential language mixture, our method reveals that superficially identical items pattern in markedly different ways in each corpus. In Wolof, their patterns are consistent with Wolof adjectival elements (i.e., verbs), revealing them to be loanwords, while in Fongbe, they pattern with code-switches. We show that this difference is linked to the degree of categorial mismatch in the languages involved. Where categorial equivalence exists (Fongbe-French), code-switches involving French adjectives may occur, as long as structural equivalence between the two languages is maintained at the switch site. Where categorial equivalence is lacking (Wolof–French), code-switching is inhibited, and language mixture is effected via borrowing. This illustrates how, at code-switch sites, both structural and categorial equivalence are maintained.

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Drolc, Ursula. "A diachronic analysis of Ndut vowel harmony." Studies in African Linguistics 33, no. 1 (2004): 36–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v33i1.107338.

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Ndut is spoken in Senegal and belongs to the Cangin languages, a subgroup of the (West-) Atlantic languages (Sapir 1971). Unlike the other Cangin languages Noon, Laala and Saafi, Ndut, as well as closely related Pal or, exhibits apparently bidirectional vowel harmony. However, a phonological analysis suggests that there are two independent phenomena that have to be kept separate: regressive vowel assimilation, which is probably a very archaic feature of the Atlantic languages, and progressive root-controlled harmony, which may be a contact-induced innovation. In Senegal, the dominant language is Wolof, a Senegambian language that is part of a different subgroup of Atlantic languages. As Wolof is the major medium of interethnic communication, most Ndut speakers are Wolof-bilingual. Consequently, contact-induced language changes are likely to appear in Ndut.

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Swigart, Leigh. "Gender-based patterns of language use : the case of Dakar." Plurilinguismes 2, no. 1 (1990): 38–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/pluri.1990.873.

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L'étude des choix linguistiques et des attitudes de Dakarois ayant au moins une connaissance du wolof et du français, examine comment ceux-ci se situent dans leur univers socio-linguistique, d'une génération à l'autre, d'un sexe à l'autre. Le wolof urbain, un code-swithching de wolof et de français au niveau intra-phrastique, fonctionne comme code non marqué dans de nombreux contextes, informels surtout, pour des bilingues équilibrés. L'enquête auprès de 35 sujets étudiés en profondeur révèle que les femmes sont plutôt conservatrices : elles parlent wolof davantage que français, et leur wolof urbain est moins influencé par le français que celui des hommes. Et, si certaines jeunes femmes -les disquettes -font de l'usage du français la clé pour entrer dans un autre groupe socio-économique que le leur, cette innovation, qui est un choix marqué pour leur sexe, n'est pas généralisée. L'examen du répertoire linguistique (wolof, français et wolof urbain) selon le sexe et l'âge indique en effet que l’avenir linguistique se situe plutôt du côté du wolof urbain. A la différence de ses aînés, la jeune génération est constamment exposée au français. Cependant les jeunes hommes, soumis à une pression de leurs pairs afin d’éviter trop de français, n'ont pas de variété "pure" du wolof à leur disposition et sont les locuteurs par excellence du wolof urbain. Les jeunes femmes, par contre, représentent le dernier groupe à Dakar à parler un wolof plus "pur" avec quelque facilité, du fait d'un contact domestique fréquent avec leurs aînées ; elles tentent souvent de se corriger, même entre elles, lorsqu'elles utilisent la forme mixte. La pression sociale est inverse. Mais, quoique capables de recourir à un wolof plus "pur", elles ne se contrôlent pas constamment et transmettent involontairement à leurs enfants des emprunts au français qui feront donc partie de leur première langue. Entre le français à l’école et le wolof urbain à la maison, ces enfants ne seront plus exposés à la variété plus profonde du wolof.

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Vold Lexander, Kristin. "Texting and African language literacy." New Media & Society 13, no. 3 (2011): 427–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444810393905.

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Mobile communication has become an important part of everyday life in Senegal, and text messages have turned out to be highly multilingual. So far Senegalese language policy has supported the use of the official language, French, in education and in writing in general, while the majority language, Wolof, has dominated the oral sphere. As SMS texts tend to include use of Wolof and other African languages as well as French, the question is whether texting will pave the way for African language literacy practices. The aim of this article is to study texting’s potential impact on the status of African languages as written languages through the investigation of SMS messages written and received by fifteen students from Dakar. Ethnographic tools have been used to collect text messages in Wolof, Fulfulde and French, as well as English, Spanish and Arabic, and also data on the context of communication and on the writers’ and receivers’ interpretations of the use of different languages. The analysis shows that African languages are given different roles and values in texting, being used in monolingual messages, in functional codeswitching and in mixed code messages.

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Bourdeau, Corentin, and Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia. "The contact-based emergence of the subject-focus construction in Wolof." Linguistics in the Netherlands 40 (November 3, 2023): 4–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/avt.00076.bou.

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Abstract In this article, we focus on the origin of the Wolof subject-focus construction (SFC) from a dynamic perspective. In Wolof, argument focus is expressed morpho-syntactically by means of copulaless cleft constructions consisting of the juxtaposition of the focus and a free relative clause. The free relative clause is headed by a determiner, which takes the form a in the case of the SFC. The determiner a is not found anywhere else in the language outside of SFC. We hypothesise that Wolof borrowed its SFC from Berber languages. The sociohistorical scenario, based on oral tradition, could have been the emergence of Wolof, as a crucible of contact between peoples of diverse origin including Berber groups. This finding is strengthened by the occurrence of other elements common to Wolof and Berber languages, such as clitic attraction, negation, copula insertion, as well as a number of lexical parallelisms.

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KANE, Hafissatou. "Doubling in Wolof-French Bilingual Speech." Journal of World Englishes and Educational Practices 3, no. 4 (2021): 31–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/jweep.2021.3.4.5.

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This paper presents an analysis of the phenomenon of doubling in the context of Wolof-French codeswitching where the French subordinating conjunction comme “as” and its Wolof counterpart ni, often appear in succession. More specifically, the paper analyses the different patterns underlying the structure of these two conjunctions in the mixed sentence. The first observation is that doubling occurs either in the sentence initial position or between the independent clause and subordinate one. This suggests that each double corresponds both languages’ word order in the sense that in both Wolof and French, subordinating conjunctions can occupy the initial and middle position of the sentence. The study also indicates that the Wolof conjunction ni always occurs at the beginning of the subordinate clause, otherwise, the sentence becomes ungrammatical. For this reason, we claim that the Wolof conjunction (and not the French one) combines the subordinate clause to the independent one. Also, this is why the French conjunction comme may be dropped from the mixed sentence while the omission of the Wolof ni makes it ungrammatical. Using the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model to explain the indispensability of the Wolof conjunction, it is shown that this subordinating conjunction is a bridge system morpheme. Like outsider system morphemes, earlies and bridges also come from Wolof, the matrix language in Wolof-French codeswitching.

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Sohna, Zola. "The Myth of “Cry Wolof”: The Wolof Provenance of African American Language." Journal of Black Studies 48, no. 5 (2017): 446–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021934717701418.

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The term “Cry Wolof” is a disparaging catchphrase first introduced by U.S. linguist Laurence Horn as a dismissal of Wolof etymologies in African American language. The cogency of this catchphrase is largely dependent on the circa-1970s argument that the African American term hip meaning (among other things) “in fashion” or “to inform” is derived from the Wolof term xippi meaning, “to open the eyes.” This study aims to demonstrate that while the Wolof term xippi is not the proper etymology of hip, the etymology of hip is indeed Wolof. More broadly, this study aims to demonstrate the Wolof presence in African American language.

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ROBERT, Stéphane. "Le wolof." Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 81, no. 1 (1986): 319–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.2143/bsl.81.1.2013699.

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Babou, Cheikh Anta, and Michele Loporcaro. "Noun classes and grammatical gender in Wolof." Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 37, no. 1 (2016): 1–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jall-2016-0001.

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AbstractIn this paper, we propose a reassessment of Wolof noun morphology and morphosyntax. Wolof is usually said to possess a total of 10 noun classes (8 for the singular, 2 for the plural), marked today exclusively on agreement targets. We provide evidence that two more plural noun classes must be recognized, which have so far been misinterpreted as “collective” rather than plural: the evidence we provide is morphosyntactic (from verb agreement) as well as morphological (from class-related asymmetries in the paradigm of the indefinite article). As for method, the main thrust of the paper consists in showing that an accurate analysis of the Wolof data must make use of the three distinct notions “noun class”, “inflectional class” and “agreement class” (or gender). Under the analysis defended here, Wolof turns out to have a fairly complex gender system, featuring 17 distinct gender values. Our analysis – and especially the discussion of Wolof so-called “collectives” – also bears on the general theoretical issue of how to establish the values of the number category.

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McLaughlin, Fiona. "Noun classification in Wolof when affixes are not renewed." Studies in African Linguistics 26, no. 1 (1997): 1–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/sal.v26i1.107395.

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The Wolof noun class system exhibits a variety of class assignment strategies based on the intersection of semantic, morphological, phonological and sociolinguistic criteria. This study examines and analyzes the many strategies for class assignment that have coalesced in the Wolof noun class system, including the tendency towards a single default class, and an unusual copy process in which phonological material is copied from the stem to the class marker in a process that looks superficially like reduplication. Wolof noun classification is examined within the comparative context of its two closest sister languages, Pulaar and Seereer-Siin, and is shown to contrast with them in that the disappearance of class prefixes did not entail their replacement by suffixes. Finally, an argument is made that noun class systems like that of Wolof which appear to be somewhat incoherent from a semantic point of view are actually typical because noun classification is not only an artifact of the human mind, but also an artifact of human language.

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MC LAUGHLIN, FIONA. "On the origins of urban Wolof: Evidence from Louis Descemet's 1864 phrase book." Language in Society 37, no. 5 (2008): 713–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404508081001.

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ABSTRACTBased on evidence from a French-Wolof phrase book published in Senegal in 1864, this article makes the case that urban Wolof, a variety of the language characterized by significant lexical borrowing from French, is a much older variety than scholars have generally claimed. Historical evidence suggests that urban Wolof emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries in the coastal island city of Saint-Louis du Sénégal, France's earliest African settlement and future capital of the colonial entity that would be known as French West Africa. The intimate nature of early contact between African and European populations and the later role played by the métis or mixed-race population of the island as linguistic brokers contributed to a unique, urban variety of Wolof that has important links to today's variety of urban Wolof spoken in Dakar and other cities throughout the country.

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Diagne, Abibatou. "Wolof Terminology: Lexical Morphology and Sociolinguistic Implications." International Journal of Linguistics 12, no. 5 (2020): 121. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v12i5.17744.

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In this paper, we study the lexical morphology of Wolof and tools for terminologization. We focus on prefixes and suffixes. We will apply morphological analysis using the NooJ tool for the identification and extraction of terms from a corpus. We will also discuss the modality of corpus constitution and sources.The lexicon and morphology of Wolof are pretexts for terminological work. Beyond the linguistic aspects, we are interested in the sociolinguistic implications of the development of terminological units in this language. This is part of the general framework of language planning which, to be effective, must be taken into account through a clear and accepted language policy. The social impact covers the fields of scientific and general culture, thus contributing to the vitality of the language, to its social consolidation and to a change in the perception of speakers towards Wolof.Terminologie wolof: morphologie lexicale et implications sociolinguistiques

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Moreau, Marie-Louise, Ndiassé Thiam, Bernard Harmegnies, and Kathy Huet. "Can listeners assess the sociocultural status of speakers who use a language they are unfamiliar with? A case study of Senegalese and European students listening to Wolof speakers." Language in Society 43, no. 3 (2014): 333–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404514000220.

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AbstractIn this study, two groups of students were asked to listen to recordings made of Senegalese Wolof speakers and make deductions about their social and caste status. The responses of the first group, made up of Senegalese students, did not go beyond the threshold of chance with regard to caste status, but were 65.7% correct regarding the speakers' social status. The second group, who were European students with no prior knowledge of the Wolof language, achieved percentages of correct answers similar to those of the Senegalese listeners with regard to social status. The imposed norm hypothesis, which predicts that sociolinguistic features cannot be gauged by those who have had no previous contact with the community, should thus be reconsidered and enlarge its scope to include a more general, and therefore nuanced, view of language. (Imposed norm hypothesis, inherent value hypothesis, social stratification of language, social identification, Wolof, Senegal, castes)*

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O'Brien, Donal Cruise. "The shadow-politics of Wolofisation." Journal of Modern African Studies 36, no. 1 (1998): 25–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x97002644.

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The relationship between language and politics in the African post-colony remains obscure and underexamined. Here we withdraw into a poorly lit area, an area of potentialities, where new political shapes may emerge as the outcome of half-conscious choices made by very large numbers of people. Language choices in the first place: the expansion of the Wolof language in Senegal, principally though far from exclusively an urban phenomenon, is to be seen in a context where the individual may speak several languages, switching linguistically from one social situation to another. Such multilingualism is general in Africa: the particularity of the Wolof case, at least in Senegal, is the extent to which this language has spread, far beyond the boundaries of core ethnicity, of a historical Wolof zone from the colonial or pre-colonial periods. And these individual language choices cast their political shadow.The political consequences of this socio-linguistic phenomenon are as yet indistinct, but to see a little more clearly one should in the second place relate it to the subject of the politics of ethnicity. Language is of course an important element in any definition of ethnicity, and there is an evident overlap; but the politics of language is also a distinguishable subject in its own right. Where the assertion of ethnic identity can be identified as a possible weapon in the individual's struggle for power and recognition within the colonial and post-colonial state, the choice of a language is that of the most effective code in the individual's daily struggle for survival. Language choice in such a setting may be less a matter of assertion, the proud proclamation of an identity, than it is one of evasion, a more or less conscious blurring of the boundaries of identity. And in Senegal the government itself by its inaction has practised its own shadow-politics of procrastination.

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Ponti, Edoardo M., Ivan Vulić, Ryan Cotterell, Marinela Parovic, Roi Reichart, and Anna Korhonen. "Parameter Space Factorization for Zero-Shot Learning across Tasks and Languages." Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 9 (2021): 410–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00374.

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Abstract Most combinations of NLP tasks and language varieties lack in-domain examples for supervised training because of the paucity of annotated data. How can neural models make sample-efficient generalizations from task–language combinations with available data to low-resource ones? In this work, we propose a Bayesian generative model for the space of neural parameters. We assume that this space can be factorized into latent variables for each language and each task. We infer the posteriors over such latent variables based on data from seen task–language combinations through variational inference. This enables zero-shot classification on unseen combinations at prediction time. For instance, given training data for named entity recognition (NER) in Vietnamese and for part-of-speech (POS) tagging in Wolof, our model can perform accurate predictions for NER in Wolof. In particular, we experiment with a typologically diverse sample of 33 languages from 4 continents and 11 families, and show that our model yields comparable or better results than state-of-the-art, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods. Our code is available at github.com/cambridgeltl/parameter-factorization.

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Badara Thiam, Alioune. "Typology of Linguistic Borrowing in the Wolof Language." Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, no. 80 (2020): 145–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.25145/j.recaesin.2020.80.08.

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Guérin, Maximilien. "Les prédicats complexes en wolof." Morphology and its interfaces 37, no. 2 (2014): 209–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/li.37.2.02gue.

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Determining the morphosyntactic status of verbal constructions is an enduring issue in African linguistics. In Wolof, most verbal constructions are split predicate constructions involving a predicative marker, which encodes the greater part of the grammatical content, and a verb, which contributes to the lexical content. The aim of the current paper is to investigate the morphosyntactic status of these complex predicates. Based on several kinds of criteria (phonology, morphology and semantics), I show that the predicative markers must be analysed as phonologically dependent words (clitics). Thus, Wolof complex predicates clearly display syntactic construction features and cannot therefore be considered as morphological units.

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Guérin, Maximilien. "Non-finite constructions in Wolof." Language in Africa 3, no. 2 (2022): 102–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.37892/2686-8946-2022-3-2-102-120.

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In this article, I study the concept of finiteness in Wolof. I propose a list of criteria for defining what a prototypical finite form is in this language. I am interested in the three constructions most distant from this prototype: the infinitive, the subjunctive-consecutive and the imperative. The subjunctive-consecutive and the infinitive have few characteristics of the prototype. The instantiations of these constructions can thus be considered as non-(fully)-finite forms. The imperative also has relatively few characteristics of the prototype. However, the characteristics that move the imperative away from prototypical finite forms are not the same as those noted for the subjunctive-consecutive and the infinitive. The imperative is therefore a specific predicative construction in this respect.

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Ndao, Mariama Soda. "Descriptive Grammar: the Study of Nouns in Wolof and English." Studies in Social Science Research 3, no. 4 (2022): p119. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sssr.v3n4p119.

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The experience of a second language teacher in English allows for building academic relationships between foreign and local language learning. In fact, this topic is a descriptive study of nouns in Wolof and English. It outlines the characteristics of variable and invariable nouns and paints out their descriptive aspects. Indeed, the grammatical rules of nouns mainly consider the determiners which vary. In Wolof for example, the determiners are set from marks of classes as basic roots. The number is marked from these class roots to rule. As for English, is marked within the analysis that nouns behave thanks to grammatical occurrences of the determiners. We have made the distinction of the number between the variable and invariable nouns according to the determiner and the nouns’ morphology. This topic aims at providing wider strategies in language teaching and learning to achieve academic goals.

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Ndao, Mariama Soda. "Comparative Grammar of Wolof and English. The Present Tense Use." Studies in Social Science Research 4, no. 2 (2023): p105. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sssr.v4n2p105.

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This topic sets a comparative issue in which, the present tense of Wolof and English is treated. The syntactic rules that govern a language are influential in the structures. Within sentences particularly, verbs hold main roles in the tense rules system. This lead to comparing verbal constructs, while considering the present tense systems. With a method of data collection, a corpus is set in both languages for verbs’ characteristics. Indeed, have shown that the verbs’ occurrences as constituents in sentences vary thanks to the aspects and modalities. Then, these verbal constructs are compared for grammatical results, leading to widening teaching and learning strategies in the first and second languages.

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Voltaire Dioussé, Gustave. "La fraseología como recurso estilístico y expresión identitaria: el ejemplo de L’empire du mensonge, de Aminata Sow Fall." Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna, no. 46 (2023): 243–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.25145/j.refiull.2023.46.12.

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In this paper, literature is considered as a corpus for the study of phraseology. Specifically, the novel analysed is L’empire du Mensonge by Aminata Sow Fall, one of the most outstanding figures in Senegalese literature. Applying the theoretical-methodological foundations initially proposed, the reading of this novel has allowed to create an inventory list of twenty-five phraseological units (locutions, proverbs, and routine formulae), not of French, but of the author’s first language, namely Wolof. With this work, and due to the peculiarity of the novel under analysis, in which an outstanding presence of words and statements of the Wolof language can be found, I contemplate a double purpose in its use of phraseology: as a stylistic resource used in order to be understood by the Senegalese reader, and as the expression of identity

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Sacharewicz, Edyta. "Ken Bugul’s Language: Its Formation and Characteristics." Literatūra 65, no. 4 (2023): 20–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/litera.2023.65.4.2.

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The aim of this article is to analyse Ken Bugul’s written language and its specificities. This Senegalese writer, like most French-speaking authors, has had to define her own written language, which becomes a mixture of French, the language of the coloniser, and Wolof, her mother tongue. The author of this article also draws attention to three experiences in Bugul’s personal life that have influenced her literary language, called by Christian Ahihou “la langue bugulienne”.

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Swigart, Leigh. "Cultural creolisation and language use in post-colonial Africa: the case of Senegal." Africa 64, no. 2 (1994): 175–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1160978.

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Scholars have recently begun to describe a speech form emerging in post-colonial cities which reflects the creative melding or ‘creolisation’ of elements from indigenous and former colonial cultures. These ‘urban varieties’ are not, strictly speaking, Creoles but rather indigenous languages whose structures and lexicons have been adapted to the complexities of urban life. A primary characteristic of such varieties is their ‘devernacularisation’. No longer tied to the cultural values represented by the languages in their more traditional forms, they reflect instead the new values and way of life found in the urban centres where they are spoken. This article, based on fieldwork conducted in Senegal between 1986 and 1989, describes the formation and role of one such urban linguistic variety, Urban Wolof. In particular, it focuses on Dakarois’ conflicting tendencies to accept Urban Wolof in Dakar as the most pragmatic form of urban communication while rejecting it as evidence of an undesirable creolisation between indigenous and French culture.

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Voisin, Sylvie. "Le Wolof et ses variétés." La linguistique Vol. 59, no. 2 (2023): 69–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/ling.592.0069.

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Martinović, Martina. "Wolof wh-movement at the syntax-morphology interface." Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 35, no. 1 (2016): 205–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11049-016-9335-y.

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Bourdeau, Corentin. "The Wolof argument-focus constructions as copulaless clefts." Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 44, no. 2 (2023): 155–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jall-2023-2011.

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Abstract In Wolof (Niger-Congo), focus is expressed morphosyntactically via specific focus constructions. This article deals with two of them, namely the subject-focus and the complement-focus constructions. I propose to analyse them as copulaless cleft constructions of the form focus | topic, that is, constructions in which the focus and the topic are juxtaposed. In such clefts, the topic of the sentence is expressed by means of a noun phrase which is headed by the definite article la when the focus corresponds to the syntactic object, and by the morpheme a when the focus corresponds to the syntactic subject of the sentence.

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Tillman, Amy E. "A love affair with pidgin." English Today 22, no. 3 (2006): 53–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078406003099.

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IN RECENT years, a married couple in the United States developed a pidgin-like patois (for their own use) out of three languages that one or the other knew well but both did not share. The following account, while telling something of their story, looks at how such a private ‘language’ can impact negatively on second-language acquisition. The study seeks also to gauge the effect of this personal ‘pidgin’ on Pierre, a native speaker of Wolof, and on his acquisition of English, a language he needs to know. In one sense their private language is a success, but in another it is a problem, because Pierre needs to become fluent in the language of his new home. He and Mary have created a language style that suits their daily needs, but their very success and originality may be preventing Pierre from moving on into conventional English.

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Calhoun, Doyle. "Reading paratexts in missionary linguistic works: an analysis of the preface to the Holy Ghost Fathers’ (1855)Dictionnaire français-wolof et wolof-français." Language & History 60, no. 1 (2017): 53–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17597536.2017.1297097.

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CONRAD, DAVID C. "NJAAJAN NJAAY GOES TO BERKELEY The Oral History and Literature of the Wolof People of Waalo, Northern Senegal: The Master of the Word (Griot in the Wolof Tradition). By SAMBA DIOP. Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Pp. 389. $109.95 (ISBN 0-7734-9031-0)." Journal of African History 38, no. 1 (1997): 123–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853796396904.

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The Waalo Kingdom's tradition of origin, also identified by the name of its principal hero Njaajan Njaay (N'Diadiane N'Diaye), is not one of the better-known narrative texts of the Western Sudan, simply because there is not much of it and few variants have circulated in print; among the latter is one collected by Brasseur in 1778 and published in Jean Boulégue, Le Grand Jolof (XIII–XVI siècle), in 1987 (absent from this volume's bibliography) and another by Bérenger-Fèraud in Recueil de Contes Populaires de la Sénégambie, 1885. The 975-line variant presented here is therefore a welcome addition to that modest but interesting body of oral literature. This one includes the original Wolof-language text and an annotated English translation by the author. Appendices include two genealogies of Njaajan Njaay, one translated from the Arabic, and another from Wolof.

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Kane, Hafissatou. "Language Variation: A Case Study of Gender Differences in Wolof-French Codeswitching." International Journal of Language and Linguistics 8, no. 4 (2020): 122. http://dx.doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20200804.11.

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Bondarev, Dmitry. "The Nigerian Qur'anic Manuscript Project: retrieving a unique resource on the Kanuri language and culture." African Research & Documentation 103 (2007): 65–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00022792.

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“Many African languages have a long written tradition, e.g. Ge'ez, Kiswahili, Hausa, etc.” reads the summary of panel 21 of the AEGIS conference “African Manuscripts and Museum Collections in Europe”. The list could be extended to include other names familiar to a wider audience, e.g., Fula(ni) (Fulfulde), Manding (Mandenkan, Bambara, Dyula, Mandinka), Wolof, Asante (Akan), Songay. The Kanuri language however, needs some introduction. This is to a certain extent a historical paradox, because Kanuri was in fact the first African language to be extensively documented in the middle of the 19th century by Sigismund Koelle. In 1854 Koelle published two large volumes on Kanuri grammar and an anthology of oral narratives (1854a, 1854b). Remarkably, four tales from the Koelle's Kanuri anthology found their way into Volume 3 of the 3rd edition of the Grimm Brothers’ Children and Household Tales (1856).

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Sambou, Aly. "Traduction technolectale en langues sénégalaises : comment se négocie la technicité du discours médical en jóola et wolof." Équivalences 50, no. 1 (2023): 73–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/equiv.2023.1610.

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The dissemination of knowledge has crucial implications for the empowerment of minority language populations. When it affects professional fields of activity, it enables speakers to make choices adapted to their specialised communication needs. In this respect, language, viewed from a translational perspective, is the main tool for achieving and measuring the effectiveness of communica tive performance. This is one of the preliminary observations that motivate a study on the translation of technolects into Senegalese languages. Considering that the technolect, by its nature and functions, calls for the use of the same translation methodology as in specialized translation, this study focuses on the way in which the transmission of technical information is negotiated in Jóola and Wolof. Using a bilingual corpus drawn from the medical text, we examine the translation choices made on the constituent elements of the technolectal discourse of this field to obtain a semantic equivalent. In the end, the study opens a reflection on the socioterminological dynamics of the two languages considered in a context marked by the constant diffusion of technical knowledge.

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De Clercq, Karen. "The internal syntax of Q-words." Linguistics in the Netherlands 34 (November 23, 2017): 31–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/avt.34.03dec.

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Abstract This paper aims at describing Q(uantity)-words, i.e. many/much and few/little, from a typological perspective, and presenting typological generalisations based on it. The typological sample provides support for a mass-count and positive-negative dimension in the domain of Q-words. Both dimensions also intersect. Along the negative dimension, it seems that languages fall into two groups: those having an opaque strategy for few/little and those having only an analytic strategy (not-much/many). Four patterns can be discerned on the basis of the sample, which are each exemplified by means of one language, i.e. English, Dutch, Wolof and Western Armenian. In addition, I make an attempt at developing a nanosyntactic analysis of the data, which aims to show how language variation in the domain of Q-words can be accounted for in terms of varying the size of lexically stored trees (Starke 2014). Finally, I show how one missing type of pattern is underivable on the basis of the analysis proposed.

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Bonvini, Emilio. "Les deux premières grammaires françaises du Wolof (Sénégal). Une systématisation contrastée." Histoire Épistémologie Langage 23, no. 2 (2001): 101–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/hel.2001.2836.

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LAM, Mamadou. "Villes plurilingues et représentations: quelles perspectives pour l’enseignement?" Langues & Cultures 2, no. 2 (2021): 18–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.62339/jlc.v2i2.128.

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L’article vise à mettre en lumière deux types de représentations : une représentation sociale et une représentation culturelle des différentes langues nationales mauritaniennes. Ressortir ces représentations nous permet de comprendre la relation que les différentes communautés linguistiques établissent avec les langues nationales et la façon dont ils les pensent et les conçoivent. La langue est un marqueur identitaire très important en Mauritanie. Avoir le hassaniya, le pulaar, le soninké ou le wolof comme langue maternelle signifie qu’on appartient à ce groupe. Appartenir à un groupe implique directement la référence aux mêmes valeurs, partager les mêmes intérêts, les mêmes normes sociales et linguistiques. Enseigner ces langues nécessite un travail important en amont sur ces représentations. Cet article en dégage quelques-unes afin de les analyser pour contribuer à la mise en place d’un système éducatif qui tienne compte des langues nationales. AbstractThis article aims to clarify two types of representations : A social representation and a cultural representation of the different national mauritanians’ languages. To write about these representations enables us to understand the relation that the different speech communities establish with the national languages and the way in which they think and conceive them.The language is a very important identity marker in Mauritania. To have the hassaniya, the pulaar, the soninké or the wolof as mother tongue means that one belongs to this group. It implies also to share the same interests, the same social norms and linguistics. To teach these languages requires an important work upstream on these representations. This article releases some from them in order to analyze them to contribute to the establishment of an education system which takes account of the national languages.

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WEBER, Ann M., Virginia A. MARCHMAN, Yatma DIOP, and Anne FERNALD. "Validity of caregiver-report measures of language skill for Wolof-learning infants and toddlers living in rural African villages." Journal of Child Language 45, no. 4 (2018): 939–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000917000605.

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AbstractValid indigenous language assessments are needed to further our understanding of how children learn language around the world. We assessed the psychometric properties and performance of two caregiver-report measures of Wolof language skill (language milestones achieved and vocabulary knowledge) for 500 children (ages 0;4 to 2;6) living in rural Senegal. Item response models (IRM) evaluated instrument- and item-level performance and differential function by gender. Both caregiver-report measures had good psychometric properties and displayed expected age and socioeconomic effects. Modest concurrent validity was found by comparing the caregiver-report scores to transcribed child language samples from a naturalistic play session. The caregiver-report method offers a valid alternative to more costly tools, such as direct behavioral assessments or language sampling, for measuring early language development in non-literate, rural African communities. Recommendations are made to further improve the performance of caregiver-report measures of child language skill in these settings.

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Rabain-Jamin, Jacqueline, Haydée MARCOS, and Josie Bernicot. "Reprises de l'adulte et socialisation de l'enfant wolof (Sénégal)." La linguistique 42, no. 2 (2006): 81. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/ling.422.0081.

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Lipski, John M., and Delia Haust. "Codeswitching in Gambia: Eine soziolinguistische Untersuchung von Mandinka, Wolof und Englisch in Kontakt." Language 73, no. 3 (1997): 682. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/415943.

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Martinović, Martina. "The Topic-Comment Structure in Copular Sentences: Evidence from Wolof." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 39, no. 1 (2013): 137. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v39i1.3875.

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This paper investigates the syntax of information structure of Double-DP copular sentences in Wolof, a Niger-Congo language spoken primarily in Senegal. English copular sentences of the structure DP be DP are classiﬁed into several types. The most discussed distinction is the one between predicational sentences and speciﬁcational sentences. The two sentences differ in several ways. First, while the post-copular DP (DP2) in a predicational sentence predicates a certain property of a discourse referent es-tablished by the pre-copular DP (DP1), in a speciﬁcational sentence DP2 provides a value for a variable introduced by DP1. Furthermore, it is proposed that different copular sentences are associated with different information-structural properties. In particular, speciﬁcational sentences are claimed to obligatorily focus the post-copular constituent (Higgins 1979; Declerck 1988; Mikkelsen 2005, etc.), while predicational sentences carry no such requirements.

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McLaughlin, Fiona. "Dakar Wolof and the configuration of an urban identity." Journal of African Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2001): 153–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13696810120107104.

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42

Sportiche, Dominique. "French Relative Qui." Linguistic Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2011): 83–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00029.

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Starting from Kayne's (1976) motivation for the existence of the French que/qui rule based on the complementizer system of French relative clauses, I show that French in fact has a double paradigm of wh-elements, a weak one and a strong one, much like what is found in the (strong/weak) pronominal system. Although only French is discussed here in any detail, such a split seems to have much wider relevance, in other Romance languages, in some Germanic and Scandinavian languages, and beyond (Wolof). This split in turn shows that the que/qui rule (and its cognates) should be looked at differently—in particular, that they should be uncoupled from constraints on subject extraction.

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Sall, Adjaratou Oumar. "Valorization of Linguistic and Cultural Heritage Through Teaching: Case Study of the Wolof Language, Senegal." Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science 7, no. 11 (2023): 2166–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2023.11.004.

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Ngom, Fallou, Daivi Rodima-Taylor та David Robinson. "ʿAjamī Literacies of Africa: The Hausa, Fula, Mandinka, and Wolof Traditions". Islamic Africa 14, № 2 (2023): 119–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/21540993-20230002.

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Abstract African ʿAjamī literatures hold a wealth of knowledge on the history and intellectual traditions of the region but are largely unknown to the larger public. Our special issue seeks to enhance a broader understanding of this important part of the Islamic world, exploring the ʿAjamī literatures and literacies of four main language groups of Muslim West Africa: Hausa, Mandinka, Fula, and Wolof. Through increasing access to primary sources in ʿAjamī and utilizing an innovative multimedia approach, our research contributes to an interpretive and comparative analysis of African ʿAjamī literacy, with its multiple purposes, forms, and custodians. Our Editorial Introduction to the special issue discusses the building blocks and historical development of ʿAjamī cultures in West Africa, outlines the longitudinal collaborative research initiatives that our special issue draws upon, and explores the challenges and opportunities for participatory knowledge-making that accompany the rise of digital technologies in the study of African literatures and literacies.

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Rubio-Fernandez, Paula, and Julian Jara-Ettinger. "Incrementality and efficiency shape pragmatics across languages." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 24 (2020): 13399–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1922067117.

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To correctly interpret a message, people must attend to the context in which it was produced. Here we investigate how this process, known as pragmatic reasoning, is guided by two universal forces in human communication: incrementality and efficiency, with speakers of all languages interpreting language incrementally and making the most efficient use of the incoming information. Crucially, however, the interplay between these two forces results in speakers of different languages having different pragmatic information available at each point in processing, including inferences about speaker intentions. In particular, the position of adjectives relative to nouns (e.g., “black lamp” vs. “lamp black”) makes visual context information available in reverse orders. In an eye-tracking study comparing four unrelated languages that have been understudied with regard to language processing (Catalan, Hindi, Hungarian, and Wolof), we show that speakers of languages with an adjective–noun order integrate context by first identifying properties (e.g., color, material, or size), whereas speakers of languages with a noun–adjective order integrate context by first identifying kinds (e.g., lamps or chairs). Most notably, this difference allows listeners of adjective–noun descriptions to infer the speaker’s intention when using an adjective (e.g., “the black…” as implying “not the blue one”) and anticipate the target referent, whereas listeners of noun–adjective descriptions are subject to temporary ambiguity when deriving the same interpretation. We conclude that incrementality and efficiency guide pragmatic reasoning across languages, with different word orders having different pragmatic affordances.

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Kretzschmar, Imogen, Ousman Nyan, Ann Marie Mendy, and Bamba Janneh. "Mental health in the Republic of The Gambia." International Psychiatry 9, no. 2 (2012): 38–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1192/s1749367600003076.

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The Republic of The Gambia, on the west coast of Africa, is a narrow enclave into Senegal (which surrounds the nation on three sides), with a coastline on the Atlantic Ocean, enclosing the mouth of the River Gambia. The smallest country on mainland Africa, The Gambia covers 11 295 km2 and has a population of 1705 000. There are five major ethnic groups: Mandinka, Fula, Wolof, Jola and Sarahuleh. Muslims represent 95% of the population. English is the official language but a miscellany of minor languages are also spoken (Serere, Aku, Mandjago, etc.). The Gambia has a history steeped in trade, with records of Arab traders dating back to the ninth century, its river serving as an artery into the continent, reaching as far as Mauritania. Indeed, as many as 3 million slaves were sold from the region during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Gambia gained independence from the UK in 1965 and joined the Commonwealth of Nations.

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Moore, Kevin Ezra. "The two-Mover hypothesis and the significance of “direction of motion” in temporal metaphors." Review of Cognitive Linguistics 12, no. 2 (2014): 375–409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/rcl.12.2.05moo.

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It is claimed that expressions that instantiate sequence is relative position on a path (e.g. Spring follows winter) are the only type of temporal expression in English in which two distinct entities metaphorically move. A possible motivation for why we do not find two Times-as-Movers going the opposite “direction” may be that people are not disposed to tracking two “nows”. It is further hypothesized that this could be a crosslinguistically common or universal tendency, and data relevant to the constraint are discussed for Japanese and Wolof (West Africa). This exercise documents and categorizes certain semantic relations (such as ahead/behind) that are relevant to the study of direction of motion in metaphors of time.

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Seydi, Oumar. "Análisis de las políticas y planificaciones lingüísticas postcoloniales de Senegal desde la ecolingüística." Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna, no. 43 (2021): 257–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.25145/j.refiull.2021.43.13.

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This article focuses on the analysis of language policies and planning undertaken by the different governments of Senegal from independence to the present. We intend to address this issue based on the scientific literature and political-linguistic decisions and actions to elucidate the complexity of the Senegalese sociolinguistic situation. In addition, we resort to the ecolinguistic analysis approach of the Senegalese socio-educational environment for a sustainable regulation of the country’s sociolinguistic ecosystem. The results demonstrate the emergence and diffusion of a mixed national identity, associated with urban wolof, which offers new socio-educational perspectives and an opportunity for sustainable regulation of the Senegalese educational system, thanks to the neutralization of linguistic conflicts.

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Aminu, Abdulmalik. "Morphophono-Logics of Interrogatives in Fulfulde Noun Classes." Tasambo Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture 2, no. 01 (2023): 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.36349/tjllc.2023.v02i01.001.

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Fulfulde language is classified under African languages, as a family member of Niger-Congo, under West Atlantic group. It has some family members such as Wolof, Serer, and Joola. (Greenberg 1963). It has six dialects across West Africa, which are: Fuuta Tooro, Fuuta Jaaloo, Masina, Sokoto and Western Niger, Central Northern Nigeria and Eastern Northern Nigeria, and Adamawa (Arnott 1972 p. 8). In Fulfulde language, nominal stems must be accompanied by a nominal class suffix (McIntosh 1984 p. 43) and agreement in noun affects both words and sentences in the language (Ahmed 2011 p. 27). The noun classes peculiar to Adamawa dialect of Fulfulde attach an interrogative –yee suffix to form an interrogative word. In order to answer the questions formed by attaching the –yee suffix, a modification of -yee to -yaa occurs in the process. The formations and the answers of the interrogatives follow some logical ordering from simplex to complex, which are discussed in this paper, and supported with examples. This paper is a descriptive linguistics research with a native intuition of the researcher, whom is a native to the Adamawa dialect, as a primary source of data. In conclusion, the paper found out that in Fulfulde dialect of Adamawa, all the noun classes form an interrogative word by adding -yee affix, and form an answer through ablaut of -yee to –yaa morphemes. Phonological processes such as assimilation, deletion and metathesis occur in the formation of the interrogatives.

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Moore, Kevin Ezra. "Ego-perspective and field-based frames of reference: Temporal meanings of front in Japanese, Wolof, and Aymara." Journal of Pragmatics 43, no. 3 (2011): 759–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.003.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Wolof language'

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