Wolof/Grammar

Grammar documentation - Wolof

• General overview of Wolof grammar
• Long academic grammatical description
• Noun classification resource
• Notable characteristics of Wolof Grammar

Parts of Speech

Wolof is an SVO language

• Verbs are static and do not change for tense, aspect, or mood
• Nouns have 10 classes, 8 of which are singular classes and are marked by specific prefixes, and 2 are plural classes also marked by prefixes
  • However, these prefixes are not morphologically marked on the noun itself, but on the dependent that agrees with the noun
    • Therefore, plural and singular nouns cannot be distinguished unless they occur in a noun phrase
• Pronouns in Wolof are the most morphologically complex
  • separated into five categories: personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, relative, indefinite

Noun classes

Singular Classes	Plural Classes
k-	ñ-
b-	y-
g-
j-
l-
m-
s-
w-

The k- class and it's plural the ñ- class have rigid and exclusive membership. Nouns in this class are:

• k- class includes nit "person", and kef "thing"
• ñ- class includes nit "person", and (speaker dependent) jigeén "women", góor "men", gaa "people"
  • other than these nouns, plural nouns are always in the y- class
• Although the classification system is far from simple, some categories include "liquids (m-class), trees (b-class), fruits (g-class), and family

members, especially those of maternal descent U-c1ass). Although the m-class contains certain liquids such as ndox 'water', meew 'milk', saw 'urine' and soow 'curdled milk', it also contains many words that are not liquids, and there are a great number of liquids that do not fall into that class, such as deret (j-class) 'blood', diwlin (j-class) 'vegetable oil', and kokaa (b-class) 'Coca-Cola'"

examples

• noun class examples with determiners
  • determiners will always have a prefix based on noun class and cannot exist without a class morpheme (ask about putting eng glossing after the arrows instead since the lemma cannot exist independently)

singular determiners

nit <n><cl1> ↔ nit	ki	The person
tëgg i<trees n><sg det> ↔ tëgg bi	The blacksmith
kër i<n><sg det> ↔ kër gi	The house
jigéen i<n><sg det> ↔ jigéen ji	The woman
ngunu i<n><sg det> ↔ ngunu li	The chicken coop
picc i<liquids n><sg det> ↔ picc mi	The bird
ndaw i<diminutive n><sg det> ↔ ndaw si	The young woman
waasintoor i<n><sg det> ↔ waasintoor wi	The fish scale

plural determiners

nit i<n><pl det> ↔ nit ñi	The people
kër i<n><pl det> ↔ kër yi	The houses

Pronominal morphemes

Posessives

• samay yax ak sama suux (wol_output.txt line 73) - samay = my (pl) ; sama = my (sing),

glosses

xeet-am, muy-toj sa-bopp

son.3pPOSS F.crush 2pPOSS.head

Her son will crush your head