| Senegambian | |
|---|---|
| Northern (West) Atlantic [reduced] | |
| Geographic distribution: |
Mauritania to Guinea |
| Linguistic classification: | Niger–Congo
|
| Subdivisions: |
Fula–Serer
Tenda
Cangin
Buy–Nyun
Wolof
Nalu
|
The Senegambian or (reduced) Northern (West) Atlantic languages are a branch of Niger–Congo languages spoken primarily in southern Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea; the transhumant Fula, howewever, have spread with their language from Senegal across the western and central Sahel. The most populous unitary language is Wolof, the national language of Senegal, with four million native speakers and millions more second-language users. There are perhaps 13 million speakers of the various varieties of Fula, and over a million speakers of Serer.
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Northern Atlantic is a branch of West Atlantic proposed by Sapir (1971). However, West Atlantic and its branches turned out to be geographic and typological rather than genealogical groups. The Bak languages were removed from Northern Atlantic by Segerer (2010), with the remaining languages seen as a valid group, characterized by consonant mutation. The Senegambian branch of Sapir (Serer–Fulani–Wolof) spans this remainder apart for Nalu, and the languages apart from Nalu are spoken in Senegambia.
| Senegambian |
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The languages apart from the Wolof–Nyun and Nalu branches (Fula–Cangin, *) all have implosive consonants, while Serer and Fula share noun-class suffixes. Several classifications, including the one used by Ethnologue 16, show Serer as being more closely related to Wolof than it is to Fula. However, this is due to a misreading by Wilson (1989) of Sapir (1971).
West Atlantic languages have noun class systems similar to those found in other Niger–Congo languages, most famously the Bantu languages. Bantu noun classes are marked with prefixes, and linguists generally believe that this reflects the proto-Niger–Congo system. The Fula–Serer languages, however, have noun class suffixes, or a combination of prefixes and suffixes. Joseph Greenberg argued that the suffixed forms arose from independent post-posed determiners that agreed with the noun class:
The Senegamibian languages (Northern Atlantic minus Bak) are well-known for their consonant mutation, a phenomenon in which the initial consonant of a word change depending on its morphological and/or syntactic environment. In Fula, for example, the initial consonant of many nouns changes depending on whether it is singular or plural:
| pul-lo | "Fulani person" | ful-ɓe | "Fulani people" |
| guj-jo | "thief" | wuy-ɓe | "thieves" |