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In:Language Documentation and Endangerment in Africa
Edited by James Essegbey, Brent Henderson and Fiona Mc Laughlin
[Culture and Language Use 17] 2015
► pp. 131–152

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Can a language endanger itself?

Reshaping repertoires in urban Senegal

Published online: 22 October 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.17.05mcl
This chapter presents a case study of how Wolof has cohabited the linguistic ecology of urban Senegal with a colonial language, French, over the past three hundred years. Specifically, it explores how this contact has reshaped the repertoire, giving rise to a way of speaking that scholars have dubbed ‘urban Wolof,’ and how urban Wolof has diverged from other dialects of the language. The fact that Wolof became an urban language has contributed to its expansion, but also to its hybridity, leading to a situation in which it has been perceived as both a threat to minority languages within Senegal, and as an endangered language, because of its increasingly mixed nature. This chapter presents a brief history of urban Wolof, as well as a means of reconceptualizing it as a practice rather than a language, followed by a discussion of how hybridity plays into questions of language ideology in the Senegalese context to answer the question of whether a language can endanger itself.
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Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Dieng, Aziz
2024. Introduction and Conceptual Considerations. In Urban Wolof across Borders, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Dieng, Aziz
2024. Language Attitudes and Identity Construction. In Urban Wolof across Borders, ► pp. 193 ff. DOI logo
Dieng, Aziz
2024. Conclusions. In Urban Wolof across Borders, ► pp. 251 ff. DOI logo
Dieng, Aziz
2024. Language Practices in the Dahiras. In Urban Wolof across Borders, ► pp. 109 ff. DOI logo
Dieng, Aziz
2024. Identity and Roles of the Senegalese Transmigrant. In Urban Wolof across Borders, ► pp. 51 ff. DOI logo
Connell, Bruce, David Zeitlyn, Sascha Griffiths, Laura Hayward & Marieke Martin
2021. Language ecology, language endangerment, and relict languages: Case studies from Adamawa (Cameroon-Nigeria). Open Linguistics 7:1 ► pp. 244 ff. DOI logo
H. Ekkehard Wolff
2019. The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, DOI logo

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