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Provides a hands-on approach to materials production. Guides both the novice and the sophisticate on how to use QuickTime Pro to produce Multimedia. Highlights the new literacy requirements that are emerging that call for the teacher's ability to read instruction on software and be able to figure out how to use it. (Author/VWL)

In describing the different types of codeswitching used in Dakar, this paper questions the frequent assumption that the use of two languages within a single conversation violates a norm. In Dakar there is a fluid and unmarked switching between Wolof and French, "Urban Wolof," that has become the most common mode of speech among urban bilinguals. (37 references) (Author/LB)

This article introduces a special section that features four Indigenous anthropologists from two different world regions—Africa and Latin America. This section is unique in that the contributions of these anthropologists are being published in the scholars' Native languages—IsiZulu, Kichwa, Nahua, and Wolof—and in English. There are a number of reasons we felt it important to bring together the work of these scholars in one journal. First, we felt that it was important to highlight the work that non‐Western scholars are contributing to a field that is overwhelmingly dominated by Euro‐American and European scholars. Second, as Indigenous scholars ourselves, we are committed to the project of decentering anthropology by facilitating direct conversations between Indigenous scholars in different parts of the world—in this case, Africa and Latin America—that are not mediated by non‐Indigenous voices. By doing this, we are hoping to promote the emergence of a truly Indigenous Anthropology. Our decision to foreground the authors' Native languages draws attention to the problem of linguistic imperialism within anthropology—a problem that has marginalized Indigenous languages. This special section is a modest step towards addressing this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates control constructions in the Niger-Congo language Wolof, which offers several insights into the phenomenon of control. First, I show that one and the same predicate can take infinitival complements of different sizes, giving additional suport to the claims in Wurmbrand (2014c, 2015), Wurmbrand and Lohninger (2023). Next, I present arguments in favor of Grano's (2012, 2015) claim that Exhaustive Control (EC) and Partial Control (PC) are derived via different strategies, specifically, that EC is the result of movement (Hornstein 1999 et seq.). Control in Wolof is only exhaustive, both with cross-linguistically typical EC predicates and with typical PC predicates, and, notably, all control constructions in Wolof restructure, and all control verbs are monotransitive, properties that usually characterize EC, but not PC predicates. This confirms a correlation between EC, restructuring, and monotransitivity argued for by Cinque (2004, 2006) and Grano (2012, 2015). While Cinque's and Grano's approaches treat EC predicates as functional verbs, I argue that this bundle of properties cannot be a simple consequence of monoclausal syntax and propose that movement of the subject from the infinitival into the matrix clause must be available in bi-clausal constructions as well, supporting the view that at least one type of control is derived via movement, and does not involve PRO. An additional argument for this claim comes from ditransitive verbs: I show that Wolof does not have object control, and attribute this property to the larger size of infinitival complements in ditransitive constructions, resulting in the subject movement into the higher clause being impeded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wolof is generally classified as a North-Atlantic language within the Niger-Congo phylum. However, despite a considerable number of cognates (Merrill 2021b), this classification is more of a working hypothesis than a demonstrated fact. Linguists such as Wilson (1989) and Lüpke (2020) consider that the Atlantic group resembles more an areal/typological class rather than a genealogical unit, thus pointing to intense dynamics of language contact in the area. In this paper, as a follow-up of Bourdeau and Rojas-Berscia (2023), we focus on a potential Wolof-Songhay non-genetic connection, based on triangulation (q.v. Kuorikoski & Marchionni 2016) between linguistic, historical and archaeological evidence. We further argue that Wolof is a language in layers, resulting from constant polylectal interaction between various peoples of the West Sudan world-system (Kea 2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the nineteenth century, Senegal was the site of some of the most extensive French experiments with alphabetic print literacy in African languages, especially Wolof. Before the advent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), authors such as Jean Dard, Jacques-François Roger, Aloïs Kobès, David Boilat, Louis Faidherbe, and Louis Descemet experimented with Latin-scripted orthographies for representing the sounds of Wolof. This article focuses on the contributions of Boilat and Descemet, both members of prominent multilingual métis families in Saint-Louis and native speakers of Wolof. Even as they expressed deference to their predecessors, Boilat and Decemet asserted their intuitions as native speakers, challenging dominant colonial "scripts" by authoring their own texts and proposing their own orthographies. I read their nineteenth-century analyses of Wolof as important, if understudied, contributions to the history of phonetics by situating their works within the politics of colonial alphabet schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Senegal, the introduction of national languages into education dates back to 1962. But it was with the Ten-Year Education and Training Program that they were integrated into elementary school, with a transition to French. This is how this study aims to analyze the use of the Wolof language as a means of learning to read French among pupils in the final primary school class, supervised by The Associates in Research & Education for Development of the Education and Training Inspectorate (IEF) of Grand-Dakar (Senegal). To achieve this objective, a theoretical framework based on Cardinal's (2008) model of the laws or “regularities” of bilingualism was used. Regarding the choice of subjects, quota sampling made it possible to submit the tests to 140 students including 70 bilinguals distributed in 06 schools of the IEF of Grand-Dakar. As for the test results, they show that the use of the Wolof language as a teaching medium facilitates mastery of reading in French in terms of fluency and comprehension.

How do ʿAjamī scholars translate Sufi spirituality and esoteric concepts into a language accessible to their audience? The body of Senegalese Wolof ʿAjamī poetry often seeks to translate divine concepts into a language that is local, both in time and place. This translation takes place within the local language in all of its literary dimensions. For the Wolof ʿAjamī poet, proverbs, parables, and metaphors are key literary devices that facilitate understanding among listeners. Studying ʿAjamī poems opens a window into a historic locality, teaching the contemporary reader-listener about both Sufi spirituality and the particular contexts in which the poems were produced. Through these metaphors, the poet ʿAjamizes, conferring sacred meaning onto practices and devices that otherwise might be outside the Sufi realm. In the process, metaphors become vessels of divine meaning. This article treats the metaphor as a key literary device whose understanding is paramount for grasping the meaning of the religious message. Treating the poems as social documents and works of literature also offers scholars new possibilities for understanding the everyday life of ordinary users in Senegambia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution aims at analyzing the communicative expression of emotions among Senegalese migrants settled in the city of Pescara, in Abruzzo, Southern Italy. These individuals find their own ‘selves’ at the junction of their subjective well-being and two cultures, creating a sort of intercultural and interlingual personal experience which shapes their relationships with their own community on the one hand and the host community on the other hand. Recent studies (Sevinç 2020) have argued that a better understanding of the concept of subjective ‘emotion’ (contra that of ‘attitude’) and its role in immigrant contexts is key to enlighten the connection between intercultural communication and possible outcomes of language contact settings. This qualitative study specifically considers the language of first-generation migrants that have been living in Pescara for a minimum of eight years, looking at their linguistic choices when it comes to expressing feelings of discontent (unhappiness, sadness, anger, disappointment) with respect to their role in the Italian social environment and their integration in the host community.

The paper presents an overview of Fula and Wolof numeral systems. Fula is represented by six major lects, for which cardinal, ordinal, distributive, fraction, and human forms of numerals are analyzed. Wolof is the closest relative of Fula, and for this language cardinal and ordinal numeral systems are also analyzed. Apart from the numerals themselves, the syntax of the noun phrase which contains a numeral is analyzed for each language. The language contacts and borrowings are also included in the analysis.

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”.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crosslinguistically, bare nominals (BNs) are often number-neutral, i.e., their number interpretation does not imply any commitment to a singular or plural interpretation. I show that BNs in Wolof are singular, unless plural morphology is exponed within the nominal. I propose a version of Kalin’s (2017; 2018; 2019) framework of nominal licensing whereby certain interpretable features require licensing by the operation Agree, i.e. they are “derivational time bombs” that must be “defused” by this operation. Specifically, I argue that the feature [+Num : PL] in Wolof nominals fall under this category. I assume that all nominals in Wolof, bare and full, can in principle be singular or plural. In the derivation of a sentence containing a BN in the object position, if the BN is [+Num : SG], it converges because there is no derivational time bomb to be defused. Conversely, if the BN is [+Num : PL], no probe can Agree with this feature, causing the derivation to crash because a derivational time bomb was defused. The BN is obligatorily singular because this is the only possible convergent derivation. However, if the BN merges with nominal structure that contains a number probe, [+Num : PL] can be defused, so that the corresponding construal can arise. This probe surfaces as an agreeing relative complementizer or possessum agreement. The singular interpretation of BNs in Wolof thus arises as a conspiracy between the need to license [+Num : PL] and the restrictions and resources available within the nominal a BN is embedded into. This analysis offers an analysis as to why BNs in Wolof do not follow the number-neutrality tendency found in other BN languages and it also provides support for the view that the licensing of interpretable features may be a driving force in the syntactic derivation.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of the morphosyntax of the clausal periphery in Wolof, specifically the two layers commonly labeled CP and IP. It has long been noted that (a) C and I share a number of properties, and (b) languages differ in the amount of structure over which functional features are distributed. I propose a structure-building mechanism that can both explain the C-I relationship and derive the variation in the distribution of features over syntactic heads. I argue that features of C and I are bundled together and that this feature bundle can be divided into multiple heads via Head Splitting, which allows parts of feature bundles to reproject. The proposal is illustrated through a detailed exploration of the C-I domain in Wolof, which bundles C and I into one head in some structures and splits them in others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an overview of Fula and Wolof numeral systems. Fula is represented by six major lects, for which cardinal, ordinal, distributive, fraction, and human forms of numerals are analyzed. Wolof is the closest relative of Fula, and for this language cardinal and ordinal numeral systems are also analyzed. Apart from the numerals themselves, the syntax of the noun phrase which contains a numeral is analyzed for each language. The language contacts and borrowings are also included in the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the concept of the labor of the living dead through readings of recent Senegalese films, novels, comics, and music videos in Wolof and French. The undead have been resurgent in cultural production for decades but these are not your average zombies: they do not inspire collective dread nor are they directed by opaque, outside forces. In Senegal, the focus has more often been on the work of the undead. This enigmatic concept speaks to the pervasive and potentially fatal mismatch between discourses of entrepreneurial self-realization and the crushing limitations and dangers imposed on many by their present circumstances. In representations of undead labor, projects of normative self-improvement devour and outlive the selves they are meant to improve, generating affects of shame and powerlessness and sparking violence toward more marginalized lives. Alongside these dynamics, though, the figure of undead work also seems to contain a grain of counter-hegemonic imagination, even affording visions of alternatives to existing configurations of labor and humanity. Central to this phenomenon is a tendency to exploit the polysemy of the Wolof term liggéey, which means work in a conventional sense but which also refers in certain contexts to witchcraft or gendered labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Le débat politique est un élément du discours politique. En s’appuyant sur un débat de deux personnalités politique dans une émission politique à la télévision, ce travail vise à mettre à jour les enjeux de cette lecture du débat politique. Pour une méthodologie fondée sur une approche pragmatique, il s’agit sans nier la dimension conflictuelle une perspective de construction du sens et de la réalité. Les débattants inter agissent l’un à l’autre pour affronter et faire exister la polémique synonyme d’une respiration démocratique. Dans cet article, on essaye de renforcer la linguistique structurale dans une linguistique du discours ainsi que le langage comme acte politique qui servira à transmettre de l’information et concrétiser un monde réel.

Digital communication remains largely unexplored in sociolinguistic research on diaspora and language. In this paper, ethnographically collected data from Norway‐based families of Senegalese heritage are explored to identify how family members use digital media to engage with diaspora concerns and projects, and how this engagement shapes their multilingual practices online. We re‐contextualize the concept of polycentricity (Blommaert et al.) from the physical setting of a neighbourhood or region to complex ecologies of digital media, and identify four 'centres', that is, distinct orientations for participants' digital language and literacy practices, in which linguistic choices are associated with diaspora discourses, genres, and imagery. Each centre constrains the deployment of linguistic and semiotic resources in ways that are related both to historically rooted sociolinguistic hierarchies and affordances of digital media. The findings support a key claim in language and diaspora research, that is, the fine‐grained patterning of linguistic resources in diaspora communities. They also underscore the need to extend the empirical scope of a sociolinguistics of diaspora from co‐present to mediated interaction, and to explore the interplay between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates family multilingualism in a polymedia perspective, presenting results from a study of transnational communication among four families with Senegalese background, living in Norway. Ethnographic interview data collected in 2017 and 2018, including mediagrams, are analysed to get insight into the families' uses of media and language. Furthermore, the moment-by-moment language practices through which family relationships are managed and sustained are examined through fine-grained analysis of interpersonal interaction. The paper thus both draws on and goes beyond polymedia to investigate how linguistic repertoires are developed in digital communication. The aim is to explore ways in which this theory may help us rethink family multilingualism as digital language practices become increasingly significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some African cultures, drumming is used for expressing linguistic meanings. Our research focuses on Senegalese musical traditions of encoding linguistic messages on the sabar drums. Senegalese drummers have the practice of playing drums in correlation to speech. We consider rhythms and their linguistic correlates as being part of a Sabar drum language. The long-term goal of this investigation is to establish the linguistic properties of the Sabar drum language. To this end, this work relies on two kinds of research materials collected from Senegalese drummers: bàkks (classical sabar phrases, not improvised on the spot) and sabar improvisations including their translation to Wolof. We study the regularities between Wolof units and sabar rhythms in the collected data. We tested the hypothesis of a syllable-level correspondence between Sabar and Wolof, assuming that each sabar stroke represents a syllable or a number of syllables in Wolof, where the nature of the correspondence depends on the phonetic or phonological properties of a vowel in a syllable. The analysis has shown that different drum strokes are more commonly associated with different types of vowels (front, central or back; open, mid-open/mid-closed or closed vowels).

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This paper investigates the resources writers activate when they spell Wolof, a West African language they usually use more in spoken than in written communication. I apply the notion of orthographic repertoire to examine three young women's spelling of Wolof as socially embedded practices. The analysis covers three different sets of interactional data: (1) texting by Senegalese university students, (2) discussion forum posts, and (3) transnational digital family interaction. The spelling practices are examined with reference to the colonial history of spelling in Senegal, other contemporary informal literacies in West Africa, and the sociolinguistic context of the writers. The paper shows that the different spelling resources related to the multilingual and mediated nature of their writing are drawn upon as the three young women engage in digital literacy practices including Wolof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a formal description of the syntactic analysis of core constructions of Wolof clausal/verbal morphosyntax within the Lexical-Functional Grammar formalism. This includes the basic phrase structure, pro-drop, and control relations. The Wolof grammar is implemented in XLE and uses a cascade of finite-state transducers for morphological analysis and tokenization. This work is part of the ongoing process on building language resources and tools for Wolof, in particular a computational grammar.

This article seeks to demonstrate the complexity of the linguistic landscape in the Senegalese capital city. It will particularly consist of throwing light on the posture of the Wolof language across various sectors such as media, advertising tools and state bodies. Beforehand, we will try to lay the foundations for a well-structured language policy in Senegal, with the paramount importance given to the promotion of local languages, particularly Wolof.

Class II HLA loci DRB1, DQB1 and DPB1 were typed for a total of 939 Gambian participants by locus-specific amplicon sequencing. Participants were from multiple regions of The Gambia and drawn from two studies: a family study aiming to identify associations between host genotype and trachomatous scarring (N = 796) and a cohort study aiming to identify correlates of immunity to trachoma (N = 143). All loci deviated from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, likely due to the family-based nature of the study: 608 participants had at least one other family member included in the study population. The most common alleles for HLA-DRB1, DQB1 and DPB1 respectively were DRB1*13:04 (18.8 %), DQB1*03:19 (27.9 %) and DPB1*01:01 (25.4 %). Participants belonged to a variety of ethnicities, including the Mandinka, Fula, Wolof and Jola ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climatic stress and anthropogenic disturbances have caused significant environmental changes in the Sahel. In this context, the importance of soil is often underrepresented. Thus, we analyze and discuss the interdependency of soil and vegetation by classifying soil types and its woody cover for a region in the Senegalese Ferlo. Clustering of 28 soil parameters led to four soil types which correspond with local Wolof denotations: Dek, Bowel, Dior and Bardial. The soil types were confirmed by a Non-metric Multidimensional-Scaling (NMDS) ordination and extrapolated via a Random Forest classifier using six significant variables derived from Landsat imagery and a digital elevation model (out-of-bag error rate: 7.3%). In addition, canopy cover was modeled using Landsat and a Reduced-Major-Axis (RMA) regression (R2 = 0.81). A woody vegetation survey showed that every soil type has its own species composition. However, 29% of Bowel regions are deforested (i.e., degraded) and interviews revealed extensive environmental changes and a strong decline and local extinction of woody species. The differences between the soil types are significant, showing that vegetation changes (i.e., degradation and greening), resilience to climatic stress and human activities largely depend on soil properties. We highlight that spatial heterogeneity is an important aspect when dealing with environmental changes in the Sahel, and local knowledge can be well used to classify spatial units by means of public Earth observation data.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the seemingly complex morphosyntax of $\mathrm{A}'$ -movement in the Niger-Congo language Wolof. Wolof exhibits three different $\mathrm{A}'$ -extraction effects: morphological marking of the cyclicity of movement, agreement in class between the wh-complementizer and the extracted phrase, and a subject/non-subject asymmetry, akin to the that-trace effect. The effects seem to surface in two seemingly different structural configurations, with their distribution not straightforwardly explainable as being of semantic of information-structural provenance. The analysis developed here advocates a unified syntax for all $\mathrm{A}'$ -structures in Wolof, and aims to show that their surface morpho-syntactic properties can be understood as resulting from the general mechanisms underlying the operation Agree, such as the presence of particular uninterpretable features and their location, and the interaction of agreement with post-syntactic processes, specifically an OCP-type effect, akin to the Doubly-Filled-COMP Filter, resulting in post-syntactic impoverishment and complementizer allomorphy. This paper offers not only a unified analysis of $\mathrm{A}'$ -extraction effects and maintains a unified syntax of $\mathrm{A}'$ -extraction in Wolof, but crucially offers a principled account for the distribution of different shapes of the CP-layer in different instances of $\mathrm{A}'$ -movement in Wolof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the relevance of geography in the dynamics of the French colonial control in Senegal, as well as the opposition to colonialism by the Muridist community, using real and imaginary geographies. Based on the historic reconstruction of Senegal colonial period towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the relationship between both views of the world is analyzed as well as how they meet geographically to create imperialist and resistance dynamics. From the analysis of the meetings and breakups of the colonial power and the controlled Muslim communities, the role of the Muridist Sufi Islam is revealed as a bridge and mediator in Senegal’s colonial circumstances.

In Wolof, conjugation is realized using an invariable lexical basis to which are attached affixes carrying marks of IPAM (e.g. in French : Indice ; Personne ; Aspect-Temps ; Mode) (Perrin 2005 : 22) and highlighting semantic and grammatical roles. Reduplication is productive at several lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adverbs). As verbal derivation is mostly built by both reduplication and suffixation, I propose here to analyze and describe the relationship in the construction of meaning between these two processes.

Genitive is a widely studied construction of languages, Wolof included. But, for Wolof, the proposed analyses have no typological reach. Reading these analyses, we could have the feeling that the genitive construction in Wolof is, from a typological point of view, unusual. The author demonstrates, from a typological approach, that the genitive construction in Wolof is similar to what we can observe in diverse languages belonging to linguistic families different from that of the Wolof. The current genitive construction in Wolof is in a transitional phase between a state where the genitive was marked by the redoubling of the indefinite determiner, and a state where it is marked by a suffix on the head noun.