Geographic
distribution Mauritania to Guinea | ||
Linguistic classification Niger–Congo
Atlantic–Congo
Senegambian Subdivisions Fula–Serer
Tenda
Cangin
Buy–Nyun
Wolof
Nalu Glottolog nort3148 (Nuclear Senegambian)
nalu1240 (Nalu)
mans1268 (Sua–Mbulungish) | ||
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, however, 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 their non-tonality.
Contents
Classification
David 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 the remaining languages, Senegambian (Serer–Fulani–Wolof), to be a valid grouping characterized by consonant mutation:
The Fula–Tenda languages all have implosive consonants, while Serer and Fula share noun-class suffixes. Several classifications, including the one used by Ethnologue 18, show Fula as being more closely related to Wolof than it is to Serer. Glottolog removes and breaks up the Nalu branch and includes Sua with Mboteni and Mbulungish.
Consonant mutation
The Senegamibian languages are well known for their consonant mutation, a phenomenon in which the initial consonant of a word changes 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:
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 postposed determiners that agreed with the noun class:
CL-Noun CL-Det → CL-Noun-CL → Noun-CL