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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.

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”.

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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]

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]

Este artículo ofrece un análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de las representaciones sociolingüísticas del wolof y del pulaar entre estudiantes de lenguas en la Universidad Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis (UGB, en adelante). La situación y representaciones sociolingüísticas de las lenguas nacionales han ido evolucionando desde la independencia política del país. Las dinámicas sociolingüísticas actuales del wolof y del pulaar, que son las dos principales lenguas nacionales, demuestran un cambio progresivo de estatus y de función, gracias a su representación cada vez menos estigmatizada entre los senegaleses. Sin embargo, las políticas educativas postcoloniales emprendidas por los diferentes gobiernos constituyen un obstáculo para la consolidación de su integración en el sistema educativo. La estigmatización de las lenguas nacionales siempre ha sido el factor clave del fracaso de la mayoría de los intentos de planificación de una enseñanza y aprendizaje de lenguas que se adecuara a la realidad sociolingüística del país.

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.

This contribution is a glottopolitical survey of Wolof. We analyzed there literary and linguistic practices for the “vitalization” of the main language of Senegal, which is weaken by the official linguistic policy. Macro-glottopolitics is the initiative of Non-Governmental Organizations, militant associations, linguists and writers through the creation of book publishing houses in local languages and the publication of texts written in Wolof and translations from French. Micro-glottopolitics is the initiative put forward by an individual writer who proposes a standardization of the language of Wolof. The text is, therefore, a tool for terminological reflection. Glottopolitical practices highlights a sociolinguistic dynamic. In other words, writing, translation and terminological standardization are devices that allow the language to sustain the battle of positioning in the linguistic field perceptible in the media and the administration.

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).

En este artículo analizo la dimensión laboral de la migración senegalesa contemporánea desde una perspectiva antropológica, para profundizar en la experiencia de fabricación artesanal de bijouterie entre los wolofs. Abordo su organzación social tradicional y caracterizo su sistema de estratificación hereditario, así como las identificaciones laborales, especialmente en el estatus de los ñeeño (artesanos y griots). Se trata de un marco de referencia vigente en la sociedad senegalesa, tanto en su origen como en el contexto migratorio. Seguí una metodología etnográfica con migrantes senegaleses en Argentina entre 2012 y 2018, y en Senegal en 2017, junto con una revisión bibliográfica especializada.

Copyright of International Journal of Foreign Languages / Revista Internacional de Lenguas Extranjeras is the property of Universitat Rovira I Virgili and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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.

How the aspect polarity is encoded in contemporary Wolof? Tackling such an issue and trying to bring a methodological clarification on it, implies a contribution to a better understanding of Wolof verbal system. How to identify and isolate morphemes in an agglutinative language like Wolof, without resorting to a diachronic analysis, somewhat full of incoherence? In this article, we will introduce the dichotomy achieved/unachieved throughout the different Wolof conjugation paradigms in order to shed light on some blurred aspects of the topic. For a better understanding of Wolof verbal system, it is compulsory to have a clear idea of the role played by aspect. Such an approach is also a contribution to typological as well as dialectological studies.

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.

We belong to different world’s language: Spanish, French and Wolof. We wanted to work on a subject where the three languages side by side a linguistic point of view and cultural. This work will be performed a comparative and contrastive. This is why we have chosen as an object of study as the proverb exists in all languages and in all cultures. A from these three languages ​​(Spanish and French, two Indo-European languages ​​and Wolof, a language Niger-Congo), and cultures, we propose in this article we focus on a theoretical approach that allows us to work proverbs Spanish, French and Wolof adopting the concept cultural statement.The adoption of this concept allows us to embrace all the different languages ​​sententious statements data as is the case in this article with the French, Spanish and Wolof.We will also see why we prefer the notion of cultural statement than saying, specifying what we mean by the notion of cultural statement.

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.