Senegambian languages

Senegambian
Northern (West) Atlantic [reduced]
Geographic distribution:	Mauritania to Guinea
Linguistic classification:	Niger–Congo Atlantic–Congo Senegambian
Subdivisions:	Fula–Serer Tenda Cangin Buy–Nyun Wolof Nalu

The Senegambian or (reduced) Northern (West) Atlantic languages are a branch of Niger–Congo languages spoken primarily in southern Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea; the transhumant Fula, howewever, have spread with their language from Senegal across the western and central Sahel. The most populous unitary language is Wolof, 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.

Classification

Northern Atlantic is a branch of West Atlantic proposed by Sapir (1971). However, West Atlantic and its branches turned out to be geographic and typological rather than genealogical groups. The only investigation since then, Segerer (2010), removed the Bak languages from Sapir's Northern Atlantic but found the remaining languages to be a valid group, characterized by consonant mutation. Apart from Nalu, the Senegambian (Serer–Fulani–Wolof) branch of North Atlantic spans this group, which is spoken in Senegambia.

Senegambian	Fula–Cangin   Fula–Serer  Fula (Fulani, Peul, Pulaar, Fulfulde) Serer  (Tenda)   Tenda  Basari–Bedik Konyagi (Wamei) Biafada–Pajade (Badjara) Cangin languages  Wolof–Nyun  Wolof  Buy–Nyun  Kasanga, Kobiana (Buy) Banyum (Nyun) Nalu (Baga Mboteni, Mbulungish, Nalu)

The Fula–Cangin (Fula–Tenda) languages all have implosive consonants, while Serer and Fula share noun-class suffixes. Several classifications, including the one used by Ethnologue 16, show Serer as being more closely related to Wolof than it is to Fula. However, this is due to a misreading of Sapir's data by Wilson (1989).

Noun classes

West Atlantic languages have noun class systems similar to those found in other Niger–Congo languages, most famously the Bantu languages. Bantu noun classes are marked with prefixes, and linguists generally believe that this reflects the proto-Niger–Congo system. The Fula–Serer languages, however, have noun class suffixes, or a combination of prefixes and suffixes. Joseph Greenberg argued that the suffixed forms arose from independent post-posed determiners that agreed with the noun class:

CL-Noun CL-Det → CL-Noun-CL → Noun-CL

Consonant mutation

The Senegamibian languages (Northern Atlantic minus Bak) are well known for their consonant mutation, a phenomenon in which the initial consonant of a word change depending on its morphological and/or syntactic environment. In Fula, for example, the initial consonant of many nouns changes depending on whether it is singular or plural:

pul-lo	"Fulani person"	ful-ɓe	"Fulani people"
guj-jo	"thief"	wuy-ɓe	"thieves"

References

• David Sapir, 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. Mouton, 45–112
• Guillaume Serere & Florian Lionnet 2010. "'Isolates' in 'Atlantic'". Language Isolates in Africa workshop, Lyon, Dec. 4