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

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.