Friday, February 18 @ 3:30pm, Harper 103

French infinitives in urban Wolof: an archaeology

Abstract:

Urban Wolof, a variety of Wolof spoken in Senegal’s cities, is characterized by extensive lexical borrowing from French as a consequence of Senegal’s colonial history.  Far from being a new variety, urban Wolof emerged in the 18^th and 19^th centuries in Senegal’s Atlantic island cities, especially Saint-Louis du Sénégal, erstwhile capital of French West Africa, where a politically and commercially influential métis class assumed the role of linguistic brokers in the elaboration of a specifically urban variety of Wolof.  In this talk I consider the ‘archaeology’ of writing in urban Wolof by focusing on a problematic area of the intersection of Wolof and French grammars, namely the incorporation of French verbs into urban Wolof, a language without an overt infinitival marker, but one with a robust system of verbal extensions, a typical feature of Niger-Congo languages.  Based on written records from the 19^th century to the present, I suggest that the French infinitival marker has gradually come to be partially reanalyzed as a Wolof verbal extension.  Further developments in the evolution of the French infinitival marker in contemporary written urban Wolof reveal that contrary to arguments that electronic media more closely mirror spoken discourse, the spoken and written forms of urban Wolof are actually highly divergent.