Monday, November 19th @ 3 PM, Harper 140

Wild Sounds in Wolof

Abstract:

In this paper we describe a group of sounds and articulations that stand outside of the basic phonemic and/or lexical inventory of Wolof (Niger-Congo) but are a core part of the language’s communicative system. We call these wild sounds and words following Pyle (2006. As noted by Harris (1951:71), they occur in exclamations, animal calls and borrowed words. In American English, such sounds would include the glottal stop in some pronunciations of uh-oh, the consonant cluster in tsk-tsk, or the use of tone in mhmmm. They are largely understudied, but are prevalent in the world’s languages; to the best of our knowledge, they have been only briefly described in Wolof by Dialo (1995). The inventory of wild sounds and words in Wolof as spoken in Senegal includes a number of clicks (velar, lateral, dental and dental bilabial), a hissing sound, and a whistle, which are not part of the language’s phonemic inventory (Ka 1994), but are included in its inventory of “expressive elements” (Dialo 1995).

At present we have identified eight wild sounds which have different pragmatic and discourse functions. Their use is conventionalized and readily recognizable outside of context (e.g. on isolated recordings). Their function can be divided into four basic categories: (1) agreement/disagreement; (2) evaluation, such as ‘like’ versus ‘dislike’; (3) discourse and pragmatic functions, including a backchannel, acknowledgement, turn-initiation; and (4) an attention-getting hiss. There is an iconic mapping of phonetic articulation and intensity of the expression: increased amplitude and/or lengthening signal a greater degree of positive (or negative) evaluation, for example. Some wild sounds substitute for regular lexical items: the dental/velar click replaces waaw ‘yes’; a double bilabial dental click replaces deedeet ‘no’; or an elongated whistle replaces waalis ‘I like’. These do not co-occur with lexical items but rather replace them. Others have what are more obviously discourse functions, such as the backchannel.

The data here were gathered during fieldwork in Ronkh, a Wolof-dominant village in the northeast part of Senegal, but casual observation has attested the use of wild sounds in all parts of Senegal, including urban centers such as Dakar and Saint Louis, and as far south as Kedogou. Our work suggests that such wild sounds, while outside the grammar, are nevertheless a crucial component of linguistic communication, warranting further documentation and study cross- linguistically.

 

References

Dialo, Amadou. 1985. Eléments expressifs du wolof contemporain: gestes, signaux oraux, unités significatives nasalisées, interjections, onomatopées, impressifs. Langues nationales au Sénégal; W. 27. [Dakar]: Centre de linguistique appliquée de Dakar.

Harris, Zellig S. 1951. Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ka, Omar. 1994. Wolof phonology and morphology. Lanham, MD: University Press of America

Pyle, Charles. 2006. Wild language. Style 40/1-2.62-73.