ABSTRACT
A member of the Atlantic group of the Niger-Congo family, Wolof is the main language of Senegal, spoken as a mother tongue by about 3 million people in that country and in the Gambia, and by almost as many again as a second language. It is also spoken by close to 200,000 in the southern coastal regions of Mauritania. It was the language of the Wolof Empire that reached its height in the fi fteenth century and enjoyed commercial and political relations with the Portuguese. Wolof is not standardized, and there are many dialects; Dakar Wolof seems to be emerging as a potential standard form. The mass of the Wolof people were converted to Islam in the middle of the nineteenth century, and there is a substantial body of literature in Arabic by Wolof writers. Writing in Wolof itself goes back at least two hundred years, and is mostly on religious themes. As for creative writing, even after Senegalese independence in 1960 this remained for some time largely the preserve of Arabic and the former colonial language French. A new generation of writers, however, has now begun to break with this tradition – the novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, for example, who originally wrote only in French, published his fi rst Wolof-language novel Doomi golo (‘The She-Monkey and Her Babies’) in 2002. Radio broadcasts of Wolof oral literature are popular.
