Juillard Caroline, Marie-Louise Moreau, Pape Alioune Ndao et Ndiassé Thiam - Does their Wolof say who they are ? Perceiving regional and ethnic membership through the urban Wolof spoken by teenagers.
This is an account of a survey of the regional and ethnic identification of young native Wolof-speakers in Dakar and Ziguinchor. Although they think they can pin-point where Wolof-speakers come from, the respondents over-rate their ability to identify and are only vaguely conscious of the clues they use to decide. They tend to assimilate native Wolof-speakers to Wolofs and conceive regional identities in ethnic rather than geographic terms. The performance of the Dakarese and of the Ziguinchorese are differenciated by the latter 's more adequate representation of the Senegalese linguistic universe.
In this study, two groups of students were asked to listen to recordings made of Senegalese Wolof speakers and make deductions about their social and caste status. The responses of the first group, made up of Senegalese students, did not go beyond the threshold of chance with regard to caste status, but were 65.7% correct regarding the speakers' social status. The second group, who were European students with no prior knowledge of the Wolof language, achieved percentages of correct answers similar to those of the Senegalese listeners with regard to social status. The IMPOSED NORM HYPOTHESIS, which predicts that sociolinguistic features cannot be gauged by those who have had no previous contact with the community, should thus be reconsidered and enlarge its scope to include a more general, and therefore nuanced, view of language. (Imposed norm hypothesis, inherent value hypothesis, social stratification of language, social identification, Wolof, Senegal, castes)*
I N T R O D U C T I O NTo explain the distribution of phonic variants according to social group, researchers support one of two opposing views: the INHERENT VALUE HYPOTHESIS or the IMPOSED
Malgré l'appropriation généralisée du wolof dans les centres urbains sénégalais, les identités linguistiques restent opérantes dans les zones rurales et les petites agglomérations. L'enquête sur les attitudes linguistiques à Oussouye (Casamance) auprès des sujets diola (ethnie localement majoritaire) et peul montre que si l'expansion nationale du wolof est accepté par le moitié des enquêtes de chaque groupe, l'attitude à l'égard de son usage familial est défavorable et son acquisition apparaît moins désirable que celles des langues ethniques et du français. L'expansion du wolof est vue comme une menace sur l'identité ethnique.
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