Wolofal is a derivation of the

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...

for writing the

Wolof language Wolof (; Wolofal: ) is a language of Senegal, Mauritania, and the Gambia, 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 Africa West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Maurit ...

Ajami script Ajami ( ar, عجمي, ) or Ajamiyya ( ar, عجمية, ), which comes from the Arabic root for ''foreign'' or ''stranger'', is an Arabic-derived script used for writing African languages, particularly those of Mandé, Hausa and Swahili, although ...

as used for that language. Wolofal was the first script for writing Wolof. Although the Latin alphabet is the official script of the language in today's Senegal, Wolofal is still used by many people as a symbol of Islamic Wolof culture. In the traditional, non-standardized orthography, a three-dot diacritic is added to د to represent /nd/; to ج to represent /c, ɲ, ɲɟ/; to ك to represent /ŋ, g, ŋg/; and to ب to represent /p, mb/. The short vowel marks of Arabic are written systematically, but /a,ə/, /i,e,ɛ/ and /u,o,ɔ/ are not distinguished from one another.

Bibliography

* Mamadou Cissé: ''« Graphical borrowing and African realities »'' in Revue du Musée National d'Ethnologie d'Osaka, Japan, June 2000. * Mamadou Cissé: ''« Écrits et écritures en Afrique de l'Ouest »'' in Sud Langue

June 2006.
PanAfriL10n Wolof
Languages of the Gambia Arabic alphabets Writing systems of Africa Wolof language {{senegambian-lang-stub