Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) share a common ‘relic’ from their colonial pasts: French. Today, it is the official language in both countries -- the typical means of official business, government, and education. But it's not a national language in either country.
National languages are those spoken in day-to-day life, at home, or at the market, and signify social unity, but may not be spoken by everyone; Welsh in the U.K. for example. The DRC has four national languages, including Swahili, Lingala, Kituba, and Tshiluba. Senegal boasts 10: Wolof, Balanta-Ganja, Jola-Fonyi, Mandinka, Mandjak, Mankanya, Noon, Pulaar, Serer-Sine, and Soninke.
The final member of this linguistic triad is the lingua franca. This is the most widely-known or spoken language in a country or region; Hindi in India for example. But in the DRC and Senegal it isn't French. Wolof is the lingua franca of Senegal with a large majority of its nationals and a minority of its land-locked neighbours in Gambia speaking the language. The East African lingua franca is widely regarded to be Swahili, and by proximity the DRC follows suit.
It’s no surprise then that in countries coloured by so much linguistic diversity that code switching is commonplace. How does French fit into a predominantly Wolof or Swahili social context?
Let’s start by looking at Swahili in the southern DRC provinces, formerly known as Shaba. (More information on the découpage or partition of the DRC’s provinces can be found here, page six). As a niche area of interest, much of what follows is taken from a book I stumbled upon in the SOAS library, Cohesion through Contrast: Discourse Structure in Shaba Swahili/French Conversations by Vincent A. de Rooij. He published his work in 1996 and thus the following review, although evocative of larger themes in code switching found all over the world (de Rooij 1996, 170), should be taken with a grain of salt.
Discourse markers, for example, so, like, or indeed in English, are the bread and butter of speech fluidity. One who uses discourse markers in their colloquial speech might be seen as fluent in this language. (From personal experience, I have yet to learn the majority of discourse markers in Swahili, making it difficult to converse, while knowing most of them in French allows me to carry on intelligible conversation).
De Rooij discovers that Shaba Swahili tends to use French discourse markers rather than the Swahili counterparts. Put simply, “In this linguistic environment [bi- and multilingual communities], French [discourse] markers stand out more clearly and have a higher contrastive value than their Shaba Swahili counterparts.” (de Rooij 1996, 169) Specifically, the discourse marker que, or that in English, was most prevalent.
What prompts this particular instance of borrowing? Consider that formal Swahili has 8 noun classes (16 unique in total). Most, if not all the words in a given Swahili sentence are conjugated based on the class of its subject noun. If I'm writing about an mti, or tree, most of the other words in the sentence will need a conjugation related to the noun class mti falls under. This includes discourse markers such as que (not to mention the Swahili equivalent usually has three syllables, am-ba-ye for example when referring to a human being that does something).
It seems plausible that through prolonged language contact with French, native Swahili speakers might replace their discourse marker with que. A similar study with Lingala, one of the DRC’s other national languages, suggests this may be the case as well. (Myers-Scotton 1993)
So, what are the trends with Wolof and French in Senegal?
Although Wolof and Swahil both come from the Niger-Congo language family, a direct comparison of the two would be moot. Wolof is structurally different from Swahili, and is in fact not standardized. This makes Wolof/French code switching less predictable.
You’ll most likely find the Dakar lingual variety in urbanized Senegalese cities, where French is sprinkled into a mainly Wolof speech variety. (Legendre & Schindler 2010, 48) Far fewer people use the French dominant variety. The Dakar variety is so widely used that “monolingual speakers do not identify [borrowed French words] as French words, and they are listed in dictionaries as Wolof words”. (Diouf 2003)
A Canadian-based duo studying Wolof/French and Fongbe/French code switching tell us about the respective languages' structures. (Fongbe, or Fon is a national language of Benin, a West-African country where French is also the official language). Wolof and Fon have gaps in their lexicon, namely a lack of adjectives. The two researchers deduce that French fills this gap as an orphan category -- where Wolof and Fon are lacking, they are supplemented with their colonial parent language.
In a short breath we’ve seen that because Swahili and Wolof differ in structure, their respective code switching tendencies with French change as well. I'm only scratching the surface of a really intriguing study here. Questions of language as identity, attitudes toward French, gender variations, the difference between code switching and lexical borrowing, or Swahili and Wolof's shared Arabic origins would credit this inquiry. The idea that Africa might be the future of the French language is especially fascinating.
This summer my masters takes me to a university in Tanzania where I’ll be studying Swahili in the language’s birthplace: Zanzibar. With a touch of luck, I’ll also be working an internship with a local media organization. My language studies are at risk of heating up...
Works Cited
Diouf, J. (2003). Dictionnaire Wolof-Francais et Francais-Wolof. Paris: Karthala.
Kane, H. (2020). Language Variation: A Case Study of Gender Differences in Wolof-French Codeswitching. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 8(4), pp.122-127.
Legendre, G. and Schindler, M. (2010). Code Switching in Urban Wolof: A Case for Violable Constraints in Syntax. ReVEL, Sp(4), pp. 47-75.
Meechan, M. and Poplack, S. (1995). Orphan categories in bilingual discourse: Adjectivization strategies in Wolof-French and Fongbe-French. Language Variation and Change, 7(2), pp.169–194.
Myers-Scotton, C. (1993). Common and uncommon ground: Social and structural factors in codeswitching. Language in Society, 22(4), pp.475–503.
de Rooij, V.A. (1996). Cohesion through Contrast: Discourse Structure in Shaba Swahili/French Conversations. Amsterdam: IFOTT.