Wolof

Wolof is a very interesting language. When I first came here my host family and friends all told me “you gotta learn Wolof, it’s so easy.” In fact, it is kind of easier. The grammar is really way simpler than French, it’s just that French is easier to learn from my perspective because the grammar is more similar to English than Wolof grammar is.

For starters, Wolof has no adjectives. Anything that would be an adjective in English is a verb in Wolof. For example, “muus” is the verb for “to be intelligent” and “tayal” is the verb for “to be lazy.” Because of this, there is no verb “to be” in Wolof. If you want to say you are somewhere, you use the word “nekk” meaning “to be located.” The whole language is simplified to eliminate the most commonly used verb in the English and French language.

Another simplification is that verbs don’t conjugate. When you are fluent in a language, conjugating verbs is no big deal. But when you are learning a language, memorizing chow to conjugate verbs, especially with so many irregulars, is a huge pain and I am thankful without it.

There are some parts of Wolof that are more complicated than English and French though. For example, there three different types of pronouns you use depending on where you want to put the emphasis on in the sentence. In English, you could say “I like cats” as a simple informative statement. But if someone asked you “what animal do you like?” you would say “I like cats.” The sentence is the same you just change your intonation to emphasize the object in the sentence. If some asked “how do you feel about cats?” you would respond “I like cats.” In Wolof, a different pronoun would be used in each of those three sentences. And it gets even more complicated than that – if you are talking about your habitual day you use one time of pronoun, if you are talking about something as a condition you use a different kind of pronoun, if you are presenting yourself or a friend you use a different kind of pronoun, etc. And to top it off, there are static verbs and active verbs, and you use different pronouns for each type. So the lack of complication in verb conjugations is made up in the pronoun part of the language. I still think it is simpler than French, but because I am used to verb conjugations and not pronoun conjugations, I find the French grammar easier to get used to.

Another interesting aspect of Wolof is perhaps more of a cultural difference than a language difference. In the US, when someone asks how you are you always say “I’m good” and if someone asks how school is going  or how your day has been, you usually say “good” and if someone asks if you’re having fun you say “yes.” In Senegal, these responses are far too positive. If someone asks if you’re having fun you are supposed to say “only a little.” In the village my Peace Corps volunteer told me that saying you is having fun is a sign that you are showing off your wealth. In Dakar people don’t necessarily make that assumption, but they still always respond with “only a little” because as my Wolof professor puts it “it is rare that someone is completely and totally happy.”  The answer to “how are you” is “I’m here only,” which is really a quite cynical view of your life status. Even if they ask “how is your family” the correct response is “they’re there.” If someone asks you how your day has been or how school is you normally say the equivalent of “it’s going” or “it’s been alright.” The most positive response that is acceptable to give is “I’m on top of things.”

There are also some words in Wolof that just don’t exist. For example, the word cute doesn’t exist, so they just use the French word. One really interesting one is that the word sad doesn’t exist in Wolof. There multiple ways of saying “I am sad,” in Wolof, such as “my heart is not at ease.” But there is no direct word for it.  Also instead of saying “best friend” in Wolof, they say “my friend of the same nose,” which I think is really cute. Also the word for head is Bop in Wolof, which is also really cute. And the word for cat is Mousse, which is quite a coincidence because of mom’s cat named Moose.

The language used to talk about family also has some differences. For example, there is a different word for your aunt on your dad’s side and your aunt on your mom’s side. My Wolof professor said that is because those two people have different roles in your life, which shows the influence of cultural differences between Senegal and the States because family roles are much more important in Senegal. Also, a girl will call her brother’s wife her wife, rather than a sister in law. This is interesting because being homosexual is not only unaccepted in Senegal but illegal, so a girl calling someone their “wife” would not lead people to assume they are married to another girl because that is not a part of their culture (especially in the villages). Another wording difference is that there are two words for family. The most commonly used is “wa ker” which means everyone you are even remotely related to. The second “mbokk” refers more to the people who depend on you, as my Wolof professor puts it. This normally means kids, but it could also mean the people you support financially because in Senegal if you have a job and your siblings don’t, it is your responsibility to financially support all of your siblings and their families. There is no word that directly translates to “immediate family” because in Senegal people rarely live with just their immediate family, they live with anyone who is remotely related to them who lives in the same city. That is why my family is so big – most of the people living there are not just my mom’s kids, but also her nieces and nephews that live in Dakar for school or work.

Names also have some cultural differences. There are a lot of people in Senegal named “papa” and “mama” and I always just assumed that those were just Senegalese names, since the word for mom and dad are completely different in Wolof. As it turns out, it is tradition that if you are named after your granddad you are called “papa” and if you are named after your granda you are called “mama.” Another interesting thing is that last names in Dakar repeat a lot. For example, my family is a “Diop” which is a very common last name, and there are also a lot of “faye’s” and “Sene’s.” Each of the last names has some historical connection with a certain village/ethnicity in Senegal. For example, Faye is a Pular name. In Senegal they have something called “joking cousins,” which is where two people who have a certain pair of last names are cousins meaning they are immediately allies. For example, “Diop” and “Ndaiye” are joking cousin names, so if I met someone named Ndayie they would get really excited because we were now like family. Another interesting fact is that when kids are called by their parents, the appropriate response is the shout their last names. So if mom or dad called to me from upstairs, rather than responding with “yeah” I would say “Korein”

My last note about Wolof is the fact that it is not a written but a spoken language. All schools in Senegal are either French or in some rare cases another language like English or Spanish, but kids never learn how to read or write Wolof, even if it is their first language. This is a very weird phenomenon for me, the idea of speaking English fluently but knowing how to read and write in only French. When I asked my brother to help me with Wolof homework, he had a harder time reading the Wolof than I did, just because I actually learned how to spell the words in Wolof while he never did. It also makes spelling very interesting. Non one ever knows how to spell anything in Wolof - people will always just have to sound things out if they want to write it cause they never learned how to spell even the most common words. I’ve even seen billboards that have spelled things wrong in Wolof. This concept would make for a good potential thesis project, because there are many studies already about the representation of language in people’s heads, and I think purely oral languages would be a good addition to this field.  Plus that would allow me to get a grant to go back to Senegal, which would be awesome.