Leur wolof dit-il qui ils sont ? La perception des appartenances régionales et ethniques au travers du wolof urbain parlé par les adolescents

Abstract

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.

Between phatic communion and coping tactic. Casamançais multilingual practices

“…Instead of maintaining his playfulness, his sentences broke up into clumsy junks whenever he had to think of the right technical terms which he frequently could not help but replace with French words. In principle this is not remarkable since Urban Wolof incorporates many French words (Juillard 1994;Swigart 2000;McLaughlin 2008) and 'Wolof only works with a little bit of French', as one of my other informants once explained to me. Augustin, however, later admitted that he had struggled to find appropriate Wolof expressions.…”

Between phatic communion and coping tactic. Casamançais multilingual practices

“…Instead of maintaining his playfulness, his sentences broke up into clumsy junks whenever he had to think of the right technical terms which he frequently could not help but replace with French words. In principle this is not remarkable since Urban Wolof incorporates many French words (Juillard 1994;Swigart 2000;McLaughlin 2008) and 'Wolof only works with a little bit of French', as one of my other informants once explained to me. Augustin, however, later admitted that he had struggled to find appropriate Wolof expressions.…”

Research Methodologies in Urban Wolof Studies: A Critical Review of the Literature and Suggestion for New Analytical Perspectives

“…It was Wioland and Calvet (1968) who, for the first time, spoke of Wolof in terms of it being the main vehicular language of Senegal (Calvet, 1994a, pp. 91-92) but it was Swigart (1992, p. 84), Calvet (1994aCalvet ( , 1994b, and Juillard et al (1994) who highlighted more thoroughly the urban qualities of the language. They are perhaps the earliest authors to have used the appellation "urban Wolof".…”

“…There is a considerable body of research on UW, where the Senegalese urbanites' speech has been the object of scrutiny. The Senegalese city-dwellers have a rather relatively large linguistic repertoire which scholars have called by many names such as "Franlof", "Francolof", "Fran-Wolof" (Thiam, 1994, p. 13); "Dakar Wolof" (McLaughlin, 2001) and "urban Wolof" (Swigart, 1992;Calvet, 1994aCalvet, , 1994bJuillard et al, 1994;McLaughlin, 2008aMcLaughlin, , 2008c. What the scholarship is mainly concentrated on is how the Senegalese city-dweller languages in Senegal.…”