Wolof Language Guide

Also spoken in
Senegal, Mauritania, Gambia
Script
Latin

Where it's spoken

Senegal's constitution names French the country's sole official language and lists Wolof as one of Senegal's national languages, alongside several others. According to one academic account, Wolof functions as Senegal's lingua franca, and its role in that capacity keeps growing with the spread of private radio, television, and social media.

Mauritania's constitution likewise names Wolof one of that country's national languages, with Arabic as Mauritania's sole official language. Wolof is also spoken in the Gambia.

Sources

Script & pronunciation

Senegal issued a decree establishing an official Latin-based transcription for the country's national languages, including Wolof, only after independence, in the second half of the twentieth century. Before that decree, Wolof had for a long period already been written in Wolofal, an Arabic-based script.

The Latin alphabet used for Wolof adds two extra consonant letters beyond the standard Latin set, ñ and ŋ, plus the accented vowels à, é, ë and ó; the ordinary Latin letters h, v and z are reserved mainly for loanwords. In this app's cards, ñ appears in ñaata ("how much"), as in Frais yi ñaata la? ("What are the fees?"), and ŋ appears in French loanwords Wolof has absorbed, such as reserwaasyoŋ ("reservation") in Dama bëgg am reserwaasyoŋ ngir néeg bi. ("I want to book a room.").

Sources

Grammar essentials

An early academic grammar of Wolof describes the word order of a simple sentence as: the subject, then the verb together with its subject particles, then the direct object, then any indirect or other complements; when the direct object is a pronoun, the grammar notes, it goes immediately after the subject marker rather than later in the sentence. This app's Duma lekk yàpp ("I don't eat meat") follows the same subject-then-verb-then-object order; its own notes describe duma here as built from a du- prefix combined with a person marker.

The same grammar describes a second Wolof negation pattern, a suffix attached to the verb stem, most often -ul: for the verb gis ("to see"), it gives gisu ma ("I don't see") and gisul ("he/she doesn't see"). This app's cards use the same suffix today: leerul ("is not clear"), from leer ("to be bright, clear"), describes a blurry photo, and the same card's own notes point out that the identical suffix appears in amul ("there isn't any").

Sources

Politeness & etiquette

An early academic grammar of Wolof records a full set of personal pronouns with separate singular and plural forms for every grammatical person, including a distinct singular and plural form of "you" in their isolated form, yô and yen. Consistent with this, this app's cards use a singular subject pronoun, nga, in phrases addressed to one person, such as Naka nga def? ("How are you?"), and a plural subject pronoun, ngeen, in phrases such as Mën ngeen jëfandikoo xaalis? ("Can you exchange money?").

The same grammar records dyamerèk, or dyam rek — "peace only" — as a set formula for replying to a greeting, built on jàmm, the Wolof word for peace. This app's cards use the same word in other everyday exchanges: Maa ngi ci jàmm ("I am at peace") is a standard reply to "how are you", and Ci jàmm ("go in peace") is said to see someone off.

Sources

Browse all TravelPhrases languages