Wolof

How the pronoun carries the tense

Wolof verbs are unchangeable stems. The pronoun takes the inflection instead, and grammars call it a temporal pronoun or a focus form. Naa means 'I, already or definitely', dinaa 'I, soon', and damay 'I, regularly'. Dem naa is 'I have already gone'; Dinaa dem is 'I will go soon'.

Aspect matters more than tense. The central split is whether an action is finished or still going on from the speaker's point of view, whenever it happens.

A suffix, -(w)oon, marks an action that certainly lay in the past: Demoon naa Ndakaaru, 'I already went to Dakar'. Grammatical gender is absent. One pronoun covers he, she and it, and bu góor or bu jigéen is added to a word such as xarit, 'friend', where the sex matters. Unlike most languages of its family, Wolof has no tones.

Why Senegal's towns meet in Wolof

A 2017 study estimated that 90% of Senegalese speak Wolof and 39% speak it as a first language, against about 40% of the population who are ethnically Wolof. In Dakar the estimate was 95%. Growth of the capital created the need for a common language, and people from different groups who meet in a town speak Wolof with each other.

In Dakar and other cities an urban Wolof has formed from Wolof, French and other languages, used in markets and on public transport and increasingly online. The spread worries some other groups. A proposal in 2000 to require public servants to speak Wolof met opposition from speakers of other national languages, Pulaar above all, and was never carried out.

Which scripts have carried Wolof

The Latin alphabet runs A, À, B, C, D, E, É, Ë, F, G, I, J, K, L, M, N, Ñ, Ŋ, O, Ó, P, Q, R, S, T, U, W, X, Y, with H, V and Z kept for foreign words. The Centre de linguistique appliquée de Dakar is the recognised authority on its spelling.

Wolofal, the Arabic-based script, was the first writing system adopted for Wolof, in use since before colonial rule. The government set it between 1985 and 1990 without a decree, and it is still used in Quranic schools. A third script, Garay, was invented by Assane Faye in 1961 and has a small following.

What separates Senegalese from Gambian Wolof

The two are distinct national standards. They use different spellings and take technical words from different sources, French in Senegal and English in the Gambia, yet speakers understand each other in speech and on paper. Lebu Wolof is a different case: standard speakers cannot follow it, which went unnoticed because every Lebu speaker is bilingual in the standard.