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In:Anthropological Linguistics: Perspectives from Africa
Edited by Andrea Hollington, Alice Mitchell and Nico Nassenstein
[Culture and Language Use 23] 2024
► pp. 306–330

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Chapter 12
Perception and expression of color among the Wolof of Senegal

 | Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 1 February 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.23.12sal
Abstract
The analysis and description of color terms has re-emerged at the center of discussions in contemporary anthropological linguistic research (based on well-established previous studies over the past decades). However, work on color terms is still lacking in most West African linguistic research, particularly in Senegal. Wolof, a lingua franca spoken mainly in Senegal, has three basic colors used with adverbs that are never used in other contexts, namely ñuul ‘black’, ñuul kukk ‘extremely black’, weex ‘white’, weex tàll ‘extremely white’, xonq ‘red’ and xonq coyy ‘extremely red’, around which gravitate other shades of color whose terms are taken from the surrounding vocabulary. The aim of this chapter is first to present the color concepts and their “shades” in Wolof and to discuss the question of the morphosyntactic encoding of color terms in linguistic constructions. We will also consider their classification on the basis of their semantic properties and occurrence in idiomatic expressions. Finally, we will show how the community identifies itself through colors and what symbolic representations of colors exist in the Wolof-speaking community.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Wolof: The ethnolinguistic context, data and the present study
    • 1.2General theoretical framework on color terminology
  • 2.Terminology of color concepts in Wolof
  • 3.Categorization of colors in Wolof
    • 3.1Basic color terms
      • 3.1.1Black, red and white
      • 3.1.2Other linguistic operations with basic color terms
      • 3.1.3Cultural connotations related to basic color terms
        • i.The color white
        • ii.Idiomatic expressions with ñuul ‘black’
        • iii.Idiomatic expressions with xonq ‘to be red’
    • 3.2Secondary color terms
    • 3.3Luminosity, brightness, saturation, brilliance
    • 3.4Syntactic operations
  • 4.Names of colors distinguishing animate referents
    • 4.1Human beings
    • 4.2Animals
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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