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A Wolof speaker, recorded in Taiwan. Wolof (/ ˈ w oʊ l ɒ f / WOH-lof; [2] Wolof làkk, وࣷلࣷفْ لࣵکّ) is a Niger–Congo language spoken by the Wolof people in much of the West African subregion of Senegambia that is split between the countries of Senegal, The Gambia and Mauritania.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Wolof on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Wolof in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Wolof (/ ˈ w ɒ l ɒ f /) is a language of Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania, and the native language of the Wolof people. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula , it belongs to the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo language family .
It is basically the name of a West African Ajami script as used for that language. Wolofal was the first script for writing Wolof. Although the Latin alphabet is the primary official script of the language in today's Senegal, Wolofal is still used by many people as a symbol of
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 [ citation needed ] .
It is used in particular for the writing of the Wolof language, spoken mostly in Senegal, although that language is more often written in the Latin alphabet and to a lesser extent in the Arabic (Wolofal) alphabet. It is written from right to left, and distinguishes letter case.
In some English publications, predominantly those referring to Gambian Wolof, the spelling "Wollof" is used, because this spelling will induce native English speakers to pronounce the term correctly as a Wolof speaker.
The Mande languages show a few lexical similarities with the Atlantic–Congo language family, so together they have been proposed as parts of a larger Niger–Congo language family since the 1950s. However, the Mande languages lack the noun-class morphology that is the primary identifying feature of the Atlantic–Congo languages.