ABSTRACT
There are texts aplenty in Dakar: texts in French; texts in other international languages, notably in Arabic; texts available in government-sponsored documentation (always in French) or in libraries and bookshops (mostly in French). Senegal is the birthplace of a major French-language poet, Leopold Sedar Senghor, co-founder with Aimé Césaire of the Negritude movement, member of the Académie Française and President of the Republic of Senegal from 1960 to 1980. Senghor’s political and cultural rival, Cheikh Anta Diop, historian, polemicist, defender of African culture and of the Wolof language, also produced his many volumes in French, and published them in Paris. These are only two internationally known Senegalese writers in French: there are many more, some very distinguished. But their very success draws attention to an important lack: that of written texts in the language that most of the people in the country speak, the urban dialect of the Wolof language centred on the city of Dakar.
