260 Fiona Me Laughlin
adjective is borrowed. Codeswitching between Wolof and French, however, is a dif-
ferent matter, but one that is beyond the scope of this discussion. Byway of example,
the colour green, vert, is borrowed in its feminine form as the adjective wert, but the
adjective rond 'round' is borrowed in its masculine form, ro ~ ro, while the adjective
for 'happy', content, is borrowed as something that is phonologically in between the
masculine and feminine forms, namely kontaan. In the masculine form in French
the final nasal consonant is not pronounced although the preceding vowel is nasal-
ized, but in the feminine form the nasal consonant is both pronounced and followed
by a voiceless alveolar stop, [t]. In the Wolof loan form the [n] is pronounced, but the
[t] is not there, although [nt] is a licensed final cluster in Wolof. Future research may
show that such variables as frequency of use, hypercorrection, or phonological and
prosodic considerations play a role in deciding which form of the adjective is bor-
rowed, but for the moment the question must remain unanswered.
Even in urban Wolof, adjectives from core semantic categories such as SIZE, AGE,
and DIMENSION tend not to be borrowed. The exception, however, comes with COL-
OUR terms of which Wolof has only three underived items, nuul 'black', weex 'white',
and xonq 'red', in accordance with universal patterns of colour terms described by
Berlin and Kay (1969). These three basic colour terms are sometimes borrowed, but
it is the other colours, like yellow, green, and blue, that are far more frequently bor-
rowed from French even though they can be captured by Wolof nouns, as seen in
§4.2. Adjectives in other semantic categories, such as those of human propensity and
physical properties, more readily occur as loans. Some smaller semantic fields, such
as adjectives that denote religious values, tend to be borrowed from Arabic, which is
understandable given that Islam is the predominant religion of Wolof speakers.
There is at least one French adjective that appears to be borrowed without becom-
ing an adjectival verb, although its status is ambiguous. This is the Wolof word piir
'pure' from French pur. It is used in post-nominal position, just as it is in French, in
expressions like olofpiir 'pure Wolof ',soowpiir 'pure curdled milk', or xaalispiir 'pu
gold'. It sometimes gets the high pitch accent associated with ideophones, but there
are no conominal ideophones elsewhere in Wolof, only coverbal ones. The behav-
iour of piir is puzzling, and is just one example of the effects of the grammatical
influence of French on urban Wolof.^10
5 Summary and conclusions
This chapter has attempted to examine the widespread hypothesis that Wolof has no
adjectives in light of Dixon's observations about the universality of adjective class-
es articulated in Chapter i. While lexemes most likely to be adjectives from a uni-
(^10) Meechan and Poplack (1995: 181) have another example, vrai gayn, in which a French adjec-
tive, vrai, 'real, true', precedes a Wolof noun gayn 'friend' as it would in French. Although the phrase
is embedded in a Wolof sentence, it is none the less uttered in a situation of codeswitching where the
Wolof speaker also speaks French. Such examples demand a different approach and are beyond the
scope of this discussion.