Le français et le wolof — French and Wolof

Code-switching is not a deficiency

This lesson exists to correct an assumption that monolingual visitors bring without noticing they have it: that mixing two languages in one sentence indicates incomplete command of either. It does not, and the evidence is straightforward. Code-switching is **rule-governed**. Speakers do not splice at random; the switches happen at grammatically licensed points, and a sentence that mixes Wolof and French still obeys the morphology of both at the places where each applies. Producing it requires enough competence in both languages to know where the seams can go, which is why fluent bilinguals switch more than beginners do, not less. It is also **functional**: speakers switch to mark a topic, to signal formality or intimacy, to quote somebody, to include or exclude a listener, or because one language simply has the word — and those choices are made fast and consistently. What follows for a learner is practical. In Dakar you will hear French embedded in Wolof far more often than Wolof embedded in French, and the French material will often be exactly the part you can catch: numbers, times, institutional vocabulary, technical terms, discourse markers. That makes overheard conversation a strange experience — you understand fragments with no connective tissue. The right response is not to despair of your French, which is working fine, but to recognise that you are hearing a language you do not speak with your own stitched through it. Three things worth doing. Learn ten words of Wolof — 'nanga def' how are you, 'maangi fi' I'm fine, 'jërejëf' thank you, 'ba beneen' see you — because the effort is noticed and warmly received, and because greetings in Senegal are long, formal and genuinely important. Ask people what they grew up speaking rather than what their mother tongue is. And resist the instinct to treat somebody's French as a measure of their education or intelligence: in a country where school is in a second language, fluency in French measures how much schooling somebody got, which is a fact about opportunity rather than ability. Lesson 84 takes that up directly. One last observation that cuts both ways. Alex's closing line is accurate and slightly uncomfortable, and it is left uncomfortable on purpose: the language he has spent two years learning for pleasure is, here, the language people must master to get a job, pass an exam or read a contract. That asymmetry is worth sitting with rather than resolving.