Senegambian languages

Senegambian
Geographic
distribution:		 Mauritania to Guinea
Linguistic classification:

Niger–Congo

Subdivisions:
  • Fula–Serer
  • Tenda
  • Cangin
  • Buy–Nyun
  • Wolof
  • Nalu
Glottolog: nort3148  (Nuclear Senegambian)[1]
nalu1240  (Nalu)[2]
mans1268  (Sua–Mbulungish)[3]

The Senegambian languages are a branch of Niger–Congo languages centered on Senegal (and Senegambia), with most languages spoken there and in neighboring southern Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea. The transhumant Fula, howewever, have spread with their languages 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. A special feature of the Senegambian languages not found outside the group is its non-tonality.

Classification

Sapir (1971) proposed a West Atlantic branch of the Niger–Congo languages that included a Northern branch largely synonymous with Senegambian. However, Sapir's West Atlantic and its branches turned out to be geographic and typological rather than genealogical groups. The only investigation since then, Segerer (2010), removed the Bak languages from Sapir's Northern West Atlantic but found that the remaining languages, Senegambian (Serer–Fulani–Wolof), to be a valid group, characterized by consonant mutation:

Senegambian 

 Fula–Tenda 

 Fula–Serer 

Fula (Fulani)

Serer



 (Tenda) 
 Tenda 

Basari–Bedik

Konyagi (Wamei), Bapeng

Biafada–Pajade (Badjara)

Cangin languages



 Wolof–Nyun 

Wolof


 Buy–Nyun 

Kasanga, Kobiana (Buy)

Banyum (Nyun)

Nalu (Baga Mboteni, Mbulungish, Nalu)



The Fula–Tenda languages all have implosive consonants, while Serer and Fula share noun-class suffixes. Several classifications, including the one used by Ethnologue 17, show Fula as being more closely related to Wolof than it is to Serer. However, this is due to a misreading of Sapir's data by Wilson (1989).[4]

Glottolog removes and breaks up the Nalu branch, and includes Sua with Mboteni and Mbulungish.[3]

Consonant mutation

The Senegamibian languages 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"

Noun classes

The West Atlantic languages are defined by their noun-class systems, which are similar to those found in other Niger–Congo languages, most famously the Bantu languages. Most West Atlantic, and indeed Niger–Congo, noun-class systems are marked with prefixes, and linguists generally believe that this reflects the proto-Niger–Congo system. The languages of the Fula–Serer branch of Senegambian, however, have noun-class suffixes, or combinations of prefixes and suffixes. Joseph Greenberg argued that the suffixed forms arose from independent post-posed determiners that agreed with the noun class:

CL-Noun CL-Det → CL-Noun-CL → Noun-CL

References

  1. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "North Atlantic". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Nalu". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Sua–Mbulungish". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  4. ↑ Segerer (2010)