Wolof (draft)

Joining forms

Because the Arabic script is 'cursive' (ie. joined-up) writing, letters tend to have different shapes depending on whether they join with adjacent letters or not (see cursive). In addition, vowels can be represented using different characters, depending on where in a word they appear.

In scripts such as Arabic, several characters have no left-joining form. In what follows we'll use the characters ي and د to illustrate shapes. The former can join on both sides, but the latter can only join on the right.

Left-joining glyphs are commonly called initial; dual-joining are called medial; and right-joining are called final. Glyphs that don't join on either side are called isolated. However, these glyph shapes can be found in various places within a single word.

Word-initial characters usually have initial glyph shapes (eg. 064A ). However, characters that only join to the right will use an isolated glyph shape (eg. 062F ). Furthermore, words beginning with a vowel are always preceded by a vowel carrier, which is normally ا (eg. 0627 06CC or 0627 064E ).

Word-medial characters will typically join on both sides (eg. 064A ) but those that only join to the right will use a final glyph (eg. 062F ). However, if either of those is preceded by another character that only joins to the right, the glyph shapes rendered will be initial (eg. 064A ) and isolated (eg. 062F ), respectively.

Word-final characters will typically use a final glyph shape (eg. 064A and 062F ). However, if the previous character joins only to the right, they will use isolated glyph shapes (eg.064A and 062F ).

In all this contextual glyph shaping the basic shapes used for a character can vary significantly in a script like Arabic. This also includes some characters that only have ijam dots in certain contexts.

Letters

Combining marks

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Long vowel sounds are distinctive.

Consonant sounds

	labial	alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
stop	p b	t d	c ɟ	k ɡ	ʔ
pre-nasalised	ᵐb	ⁿd	ᶮɟ	ᵑɡ
fricative	f	s		x
nasal	m	n	ɲ	ŋ
approximant	w	l	j
trill/flap		r

The glottal stop occurs before standalone vowels, but is not written.

اَکَرَ

Vowel harmony

Vowels in suffixes tend to be altered due to vowel harmony, based on the advanced tongue retraction (ATR) of the word-initial vowel. There are some exceptions.

+ATR vowels are: i u é ó ë.

-ATR vowels are: e o a.

Authors differ in whether they reflect the vowel harmony in writing.

Tone

There is no tone in Wolof.

Structure

Gemination is common and occurs with all consonants except q, ʔ, f, s, and x.

Gemination and consonant clusters do not occur in word-initial position, but can occur medially and in final position, where they may be followed by a faint epenthetic schwa.

p, d, c, and k only occur formally in word-initial position, unless geminated (which is common), or following a nasal. However, word final b, j, and g are typically devoiced and become allophones of those consonants.

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assignments.

Each table cell shows word-initial, word-medial, and word-final forms from right to left. The glyphs shown are illustrative; alternative shapes may occur (see joining_forms).

In word-initial position vowels are attached to 0627, which acts as a vowel carrier (see standalone). Otherwise, unlike orthographies for languages such as Arabic and Urdu, the spelling is very regular and characters used to represent a given vowel are normally the same, regardless of the position within a word. All vowel diacritics are always written.

The following is the set of characters needed to write vowels, as described in this section, grouped by general category.

Post-consonant vowels

Vowels that follow consonants are written using a mixture of combining marks and letters. Vowel diacritics are not hidden.

The spelling is largely regular. The 5 letters used for vowels also double as consonants. 8 combining marks are used to write vowels, and the sukun is used to indicate vowel absence.

Standalone vowels

Wolof tends not to have true standalone vowels. Orthographically, word-initial vowels are preceded by 0627, which represents the glottal stop ʔ, although that is not always written in IPA transcriptions.

اَکَرَ

In word-medial locations a sequence of vowels (usually in foreign words) is separated by 0639.

اِسْرَعࣹلْ

Obsolete vowels

In the past the following diacritics were used for Wolofal, but they are now obsolete.

065C was used for both ɛ and e. 065D was used for ɔ.

Also, 064E was used where 08F5 is used nowadays, and 064F was used for ɔ instead of 08F7.

Vowel absence

Wolof uses 0652 to indicate that there is no vowel after a consonant. Vowel absence is usually marked (unlike Standard Arabic), including syllable-final consonants.

اِتَمْ

وࣷرْسَگْ

The exceptions are letters used to lengthen vowels and nasal letters indicating prenasalisation. The regular use of the sukun provides a simple way to unambiguously tell when these letters are being used as consonants or for the functions just described.

سࣵنݖّ

سࣴيهْ

Another exception is that consonants which carry 0651 do not also carry the sukun.

ݒِݖّ

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Wolof vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Arabic orthography.

The columns run right to left and indicate typical word-initial, word-medial, and word-final usage. The joining forms shown are illustrative; alternative shapes may occur (see joining_forms). They are also fully-vowelled, although the examples show normal unvowelled usage as well as vowelled.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Basic consonant letters

The following letters are used in conjunction with vowels. See vowels.

Pre-nasalised stops

Pre-nasalised sounds are written using digraphs, and occur frequently.

مبَارْ

نگَ

ندَوْ

The sounds ᵐp, ᶮc, and ᵑq don't occur word-initially.

سࣵنݖّ

سࣵمݒّ

Observation: The resources consulted don't mention nt, although it does occasionally occur. On the other hand, they seem to describe any nasal followed by one of these stops as prenasalised; there is no indication that the sequence may, for example, be -mp- rather than ᵐp. This is likely to have an impact on syllable segmentation.

Obsolete consonants

In the past the following were used for Wolofal, but they are now obsolete.

Onsets

Other than prenasalised stops, consonant clusters in syllable onsets are quite rare in Wolof. There are no special mechanisms other than the use of the sukun and the prenasalisation.

Finals

Syllable-final consonants are marked with a sukun, or with a shadda if they are elongated.

Consonant clusters

Consonant clusters are not as common as in many other languages, but they do occur (especially in loan words). When they do, the consonant letter that has no following vowel is marked with 0652.

Consonant length

Consonant gemination is common and is phonemically distinctive in Wolof. Gemination is written using 0651. It is particularly common in word-final position.

بࣴتْ

بࣴتّ

Note that only one of 0651 and 0652 can appear above a letter.

Consonant sounds to characters

This section maps Wolof consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Arabic orthography.

The right-hand column shows the various joining forms for each letter.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Ligatures

The combination لا is always written as a ligature. The underlying code points are, however, preserved. The shape varies slightly, depending on whether the ligature joins to the right or not. Compare:

لَاکَ

لِسْلَانْ

Observation: When diacritics are used with this ligature, they sometimes appear to be over the ALEF, rather than over the LAM, eg. قليلاً This would require a typing order that is different from the spoken sequence.

Formatting characters

Arabic script text makes use of a relatively large set of invisible formatting characters, especially in plain text, many of which are used to manage text direction. Descriptions of these characters can be found in the following sections:

• shapingcontrols
• directioncontrols

Presentation Forms

The code points in the Unicode blocks Arabic Presentation Forms-A and Arabic Presentation Forms-B provide positional forms of Arabic letters and ligatures. They should not be used for ordinary text. Those code points are provided for compatibility with legacy code pages, and have (compatibility) character decomposition mappings. Normally, Arabic text should be written with code points from the main Arabic block and its extensions; positional forms are dealt with by the font and rendering algorithms.

For more information see the Arabic orthography notes.

Codepoint sequences

When typing and in storage, combining marks always follow the base character they are associated with.

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE comes at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

In Unicode 6.1, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2066 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

061C (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Follow the link and see expressions for details.

200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Cursive script

Arabic script is always cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up. Fonts need to produce the appropriate joining form for a letter, according to its visual context, but the code point used doesn't change. This results in four different shapes for most letters (including an isolated shape). Ligated forms also join with characters alongside them.

The highlights in the example below show the same letter, ع, with three different joining forms.

Most Arabic script letters join on both sides. A few only join on the right-hand side: this involves 4 basic shapes for Modern Standard Arabic.

Context-based shaping & positioning

See just above for shaping related to cursive joining.

See also the section on glyph shaping in the Arabic orthography notes.

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Some words are hyphenated, eg. سَݧْ-سَݧْ saɲ-saɲ or اَمْ-دِ-جَمَّ am-di-jamma.

Graphemes

tbd

Phrase & section boundaries

Wolof uses ASCII punctuation.

Mirrored characters

The words 'left' and 'right' in the Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some of the more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Quotations & citations

See type samples.

The following type of quotation mark can be found in Wolofal texts. When quoted text appears within quoted text different characters are used, though usually of the same type. (Of course, depending on ease of input, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.)

Unlike brackets, these quote marks are not mirrored during display. As a result, LEFT means use on the left, and RIGHT means use on the right.

Line breaking & hyphenation

Lines are generally broken between words.

Text alignment & justification

The principal line-break opportunities are inter-word spaces.

Baselines, line height, etc.

tbd

Wolof uses the 'alphabetic' baseline.