Why I wanted to learn Wolof

Lots of people have been sharing helpful lessons recently, like recipes, costume ideas, and tips on Avon products. I always want to do useful things like share tips too, but what I've come to realize is that I'm just not that helpful with little practical tidbits like everyone else seems to be.

But still! I want to do my part to enlighten my readers, and there is something that I actually want to talk about today, even though it is not really very useful at all. The reason I want to talk about this is because it came up in a conversation with a coworker yesterday, and it transpired that she had studied only science in college and knew absolutely nothing about the subject, and then I thought back and realized that I also knew more or less nothing about the subject until I started taking very specific classes in college myself.

I want to talk a little bit about general African history, and colonization, and tribal languages versus official languages. But I don't want to make it boring. I don't want it to be some dull history lesson that you all just roll your eyes at and move on to the next post in your Google Reader because NaBloPoMo is killing you with posts. And for me, this is personal. So it is history, but it is also about me, like most of this blog, and I can only assume that you like reading about me, because you are the ones who come here every day to see what I've posted, and what I've posted is usually about myself in one way or another.

Okay! The point here is that I was chatting with a coworker about my impending (and I do mean impending--i.e., we are leaving for the airport in just a few hours) trip to Germany, and she was asking if I spoke any German, and I was saying that I was trying to learn but that it was going slowly. And then--and this is where the segue comes in--I mentioned that one of the issues I'm having with my attempts to learn German is that I keep trying to use Wolof words instead of German ones. And then she asked what Wolof was.

For those of you who don't know, Wolof is an ethnic language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania. To be specific, it is the primary ethnic language spoken in Dakar, where I spent six months studying. The reason I say "ethnic" is because Wolof is also the name of an ethnic group found in west Africa, and it is people of the Wolof ethnicity who speak the Wolof language. I am also referring to it as ethnic language to distinguish it from the official language of Senegal, which is French.

Most people know that almost all of the countries in Africa were colonized by various European countries during the 1800s, and that most of them have only regained their independence in the last 40 to 50 years. But usually that's about all they know. That's all I knew until I took on an African Studies minor in college and started learning more about the continent and its history.

When I say that these nations "regained" their independence, I'm kind of mischaracterizing the situation, because it's not as though the countries all existed independently before the 1800s, when they were taken over by European governments. Before then, Africa was not divided up into the countries that we know now. What happened was that European countries started to take an interest in Africa in the 1880s, and that interest led to what is known as the Scramble for Africa, wherein a bunch of European nations tried to gain control of as much of Africa as possible.

Then the Europeans started to realize that having free trade and cooperation among the rivals would actually be in the best interest of all the colonizing nations. So, in 1884, the leaders of 12 European nations met at the Berlin Conference, where they essentially divided up the continent of Africa amongst themselves down more or less arbitrary lines. This is why the Wolof people are found in three different countries. Lines were drawn through homelands of various groups of people delineating different countries, and it didn't matter that half of a tribe might live in one country and the other half now lived in another.

This is also part of the reason why there are so many different languages spoken in most African countries, and also part of the reason why in many ways it has been very difficult for many African countries to establish functional governments in the wake of colonization--because there were huge groups of people who had nothing in common with one another who were suddenly struggling with how to run a country, and often the best interests of the different groups clashed.

Anyway, the point here is that this sort of methodical distribution of sections of Africa led to various countries having European official languages. Senegal's official language is French because France colonized it, and so on. (By the way, the reason that you don't meet many German-speaking African people is because Germany was forced to give up its colonies after World War I.)

But because the European colonizers weren't, for the most part, interested in integrating with the native African people living in their colonies, most African people didn't really learn their countries' official languages. Now, post-colonization, most countries retain those official languages, generally for the purposes of unity within the country, but even still, they are used only in schools and governments. Uneducated and illiterate people largely do not speak the official language of their countries, but only the language of their ethnic group or region. Even those who do go to school and learn the official language still converse with their families and friends in their own language. And in recent years, many African nations have become very concerned about preserving African languages and the linguistic diversity of the continent.

This is why I tried to learn Wolof when I was in Senegal. And it was difficult, because Wolof sounds absolutely nothing like the two languages I already spoke when I arrived in Senegal, French and English. French was a language that was imposed upon Senegal by a colonizing force and is structured completely differently from Wolof. Wolof is mostly an oral language that doesn't have its own alphabet or anything. When people want to write it, they use the French alphabet and spell words phonetically.

As far as I know, there's no official spelling for Wolof, and even my Wolof teachers in Senegal would spell the same word differently on different days. Since official documents and schoolwork are always written in French, there is little official need to be able to write in Wolof--but young people send text messages to each other in Wolof, and many people concerned about preserving the Wolof culture and heritage want to write in Wolof, publish in Wolof, express themselves in Wolof because that is their language, their native tongue.

Wolof is definitely influenced by French, though. Many recently developed words like "globalization" and "computer" do not have equivalents in Wolof, so Wolof speakers use the French words when talking about those things. It is totally common to hear two people chatting in Wolof and to be able to pick out a handful of French words in their speech. Even if there is a Wolof equivalent, if the French word comes to mind first, the speaker will often use it. This blended style is much more common in cities, and a much purer form of Wolof can be heard in rural parts of Senegal.

But Wolof is hard to learn if you've never been exposed to it before. It sounds totally different from all other languages, and it took me a full month to even be able to distinguish one word from another when listening to spoken Wolof. I still can't make many of the sounds, and the sentence structure is still foreign to me. I made a lot of progress when I was there, but I was never able to get the accent down--I always spoke Wolof with a French accent, much as I tried not to. And now that I've been back from Senegal for over two years, I've forgotten almost all the Wolof I knew.

But I guess I haven't really forgotten it as much as I've lost access to it in my mind--because as I struggle to learn German, I find more and more Wolof words and phrases coming to mind. It's hidden back there, in the "learning languages" file, and now it pops up most inconveniently when I'm searching for a word in what will be the fourth language I learn.

So, for those of you who made it this far, tell me: Did you already know all of that African history? Did you find it interesting? Or could you really have cared less?