Wolof Language - Orthography and Pronunciation

Orthography and Pronunciation

Note: Phonetic transcriptions are printed between brackets following the rules of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

The Latin-based orthography of Wolof in Senegal was set by government decrees between 1971 and 1985. The language institute "Centre de linguistique appliquée de Dakar" (CLAD) is widely acknowledged as an authority when it comes to spelling rules for Wolof.

Wolof is most often written in this orthography, in which phonemes have a clear one-to-one correspondence to graphemes.

(A traditional Arabic-based transcription of Wolof called Wolofal dates back to the pre-colonial period and is still used by many people.)

The first syllable of words is stressed; long vowels are pronounced with more time, but are not automatically stressed, as they are in English.