244 Fiona Me Laughlin
1.1. INTRODUCTION TO WOLOFWolof, along with its sister languages Fula and Seereer, is a member of the north-
ern branch of Atlantic. It is spoken primarily in Senegal and the Gambia on the
Atlantic coast of West Africa. Wolof serves as a lingua franca in Senegal where ap-
proximately 40 per cent of the population speak it as a first language and 45 per
cent speak it as a second language. Extrapolating from the 1988 Senegalese census
figures, there are currently at least 4-5 million native speakers of the language, and
at least as many who speak it as a second or third language, making for a total of
no fewer than eight million speakers, and possibly as many as ten million or more.
In urban areas, and particularly in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, Wolof has been in
close contact with French, the former colonial language, for more than a century.
Consequently, urban Wolof has absorbed a great number of French lexical items
and has undergone other grammatical changes as a result of this contact, diverg-
ing in some significant ways from rural varieties of the language.
Wolof is a relatively isolating language that has an AVO, SV constituent order.
There is little morphological marking of grammatical relations or of most other
types of inflection, but genitive constructions indicate head-marking. Because
of the paucity of inflectional morphology, verb stems and noun stems from the
same root are often identical. With regard to verbs, Wolof has close to thirty der-
ivational verbal extensions (Dialo 1981), a single tense marker (past), and a single
aspectual marker (imperfective). There is also an extensive syntactically encoded
focus system. With regard to nouns, Wolof has a noun class system comprising
eight singular and two plural classes, but one in which nouns, unusually, exhibit
no morphological marking for class, although certain nominal dependents such
as determiners do. Consonant mutation, an important morphophonological char-
acteristic of the northern Atlantic languages in general, plays a significant role in
nominal derivation, but not in Wolof inflection. Like several other Atlantic lan-
guages Wolof is not tonal, but ideophones carry a high pitch accent.
2 The verbal system of Wolof
The Wolof verb, including the sub-class of adjectives, consists of an invariable
main verb, which may be extended by derivation as described below, and a conju-
gated auxiliary that carries person, number, and frequently aspect. The paradigm
in example (6) illustrates the inflectional function of the perfective auxiliary for
the verb dem go' and (7) for the adjective sonn 'tired'. In their perfective form, non-
stative verbs have a past tense meaning, whereas stative verbs and adjectives get a
present tense reading.
(6) Dem naa Ndakaaru
v:go isg:PERF Dakar
'I went to Dakar'