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The Senegambian languages, traditionally known as the Northern West Atlantic, or in more recent literature sometimes confusingly as the Atlantic languages, are a branch of
Atlantic–Congo languages The Atlantic–Congo languages are the largest demonstrated family of languages in Africa. They have characteristic noun class systems and form the core of the Niger–Congo family hypothesis. They comprise all of Niger–Congo apart from Mande ...
centered on
Senegal Senegal,; Wolof: ''Senegaal''; Pulaar: 𞤅𞤫𞤲𞤫𞤺𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭 (Senegaali); Arabic: السنغال ''As-Sinighal'') officially the Republic of Senegal,; Wolof: ''Réewum Senegaal''; Pulaar : 𞤈𞤫𞤲𞤣𞤢𞥄𞤲𞤣𞤭 ...
, with most languages spoken there and in neighboring southern
Mauritania Mauritania (; ar, موريتانيا, ', french: Mauritanie; Berber: ''Agawej'' or ''Cengit''; Pulaar: ''Moritani''; Wolof: ''Gànnaar''; Soninke:), officially the Islamic Republic of Mauritania ( ar, الجمهورية الإسلامية ...
,
Gambia The Gambia,, ff, Gammbi, ar, غامبيا officially the Republic of The Gambia, is a country in West Africa. It is the smallest country within mainland AfricaHoare, Ben. (2002) ''The Kingfisher A-Z Encyclopedia'', Kingfisher Publicatio ...
,
Guinea-Bissau Guinea-Bissau ( ; pt, Guiné-Bissau; ff, italic=no, 𞤘𞤭𞤲𞤫 𞤄𞤭𞤧𞤢𞥄𞤱𞤮, Gine-Bisaawo, script=Adlm; Mandinka: ''Gine-Bisawo''), officially the Republic of Guinea-Bissau ( pt, República da Guiné-Bissau, links=no ) ...
, and
Guinea Guinea ( ),, fuf, 𞤘𞤭𞤲𞤫, italic=no, Gine, wo, Gine, nqo, ߖߌ߬ߣߍ߫, bm, Gine officially the Republic of Guinea (french: République de Guinée), is a coastal country in West Africa. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the we ...
. The transhumant Fula, however, have spread with their languages from Senegal across the western and central
Sahel The Sahel (; ar, ساحل ' , "coast, shore") is a region in North Africa. It is defined as the ecoclimatic and biogeographic realm of transition between the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian savanna to the south. Having a hot semi-arid c ...
. The most populous unitary language is
Wolof Wolof or Wollof may refer to: * Wolof people, an ethnic group found in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania * Wolof language, a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania * The Wolof or Jolof Empire, a medieval West African successor of the Mal ...
, 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. The most prominent feature of the Senegambian languages is that they are devoid of tone, unlike the vast majority of Atlantic-Congo languages.


Classification

David Sapir (1971) proposed a
West Atlantic West Atlantic is a holding company for two European cargo airlines, West Air Sweden and West Atlantic UK, with its head office in Malmö, Sweden. West Atlantic employ some 650 staff and operate a fleet of 22 aircraft. The airline specializes in ...
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 & Pozdniakov (2010, 2017), removed the Southern Atlantic languages. The remaining (Northern or Senegambian) languages are characterized by a lack of tone. The Serer–Fulani–Wolof branch is characterized by consonant mutation. Serer and Fula share noun-class suffixes. The inclusion of the poorly attested Nalu languages is uncertain. Several classifications, including the one used by ''Ethnologue'' 20, show Fula as being more closely related to Wolof than it is to Serer, due to a copy error in the literature.


Consonant mutation

The Senegambian 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 In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), ...
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 In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some a ...
systems, which are similar to those found in other Niger–Congo languages, most famously the
Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The t ...
. 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
determiner A determiner, also called determinative (abbreviated ), is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner m ...
s that agreed with the noun class: :CL-Noun CL-Det → CL-Noun-CL → Noun-CL


Comparative vocabulary

Comparison of basic vocabulary words of the Senegambian languages:Wilson, William André Auquier. 2007. ''Guinea Languages of the Atlantic group: description and internal classification''. (Schriften zur Afrikanistik, 12.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.


References

*Sapir, David. 1971. "West Atlantic: An Inventory of the Languages, Their Noun-class Systems and Consonant Alternation". In Sebeok, ed, ''Current Trends in Linguistics,'' 7: ''Linguistics in Sub-Saharan Africa.'', 45–112. Mouton. *Pozdniakov, Konstantin & Segerer, Guillaume (2017)
"A Genealogical classification of Atlantic languages."
(Draft) To appear in: Lüpke, Friederike (ed.) ''The Oxford guide to the Atlantic languages of West Africa:'' Oxford:Oxford University Press. * Pozdniakov, Konstantin. 2022. Proto-Fula–Sereer: Lexicon, morphophonology, and noun classes. (Niger-Congo Comparative Studies 3). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5820515 . https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/325. Open Access. {{Niger-Congo branches Atlantic languages