Verbal Gestures in Wolof Lenore A. Grenoble, Martina Martinovic, and Rebekah Baglini ´ 1. Introduction Wolof is a Niger-Congo language spoken widely in Senegal and the Gambia. With approximately 3,930,000 speakers, it is one of the official languages and the lingua franca of Senegal. Another 185,000 people speak Wolof in the Gambia and a relatively small number (12,000) in Mauritania. The total number of speakers worldwide is estimated to be 3,976,500 in 2006 (Lewis et al. 2013). In urban settings, it competes with French, which is the main language of education and government. Urban Wolof has been studied both linguistically and sociolinguistically (McLaughlin 2001, 2008), and there is additional research on the sociolinguistics of borrowing and language contact in Senegal. There are a number of linguistic accounts of Wolof phonology (Ka 1994), morphology (Ndiaye 1994, 2004) and syntax (Church 1981; Dunigan 1994; Mangold 1977; Martinovi´ c 2013; Russell 2006; Torrence 2005, 2012a,b, 2013a,b). Still, given the role of Wolof in Senegal, there is surprisingly little study of its use in discourse and few studies of its semantics and pragmatics (but see Baglini to appear; Robert 1991; Creissels & Robert 1998; Martinovi´ c to appear (a); Perrino 2005, 2007; Robert 2006). In this paper we describe a group of sounds that stand outside of the basic phonemic and lexical inventory of Wolof but are a core part of the Wolof communicative system. We call these verbal gestures. They are cross- linguistically understudied and, to the best of our knowledge, only Dialo (1985) has analyzed them in Wolof. We report on fieldwork conducted in Ronkh, a village located in northwestern Senegal, two to three kilometers south of Mauritania and approximately two hours drive from Saint Louis. Wolof is the dominant language in Ronkh and is the primary, preferred language for all speakers, although there is a small Pular community of around one hundred people living on the outskirts of the town. Village officials and teachers have good command of French, but its use is limited to official meetings and, with some restrictions, to the schools. In the home, on the street, in the marketplace and in all public gatherings, Wolof is the language of communication. Thus this variety of Wolof arguably differs from Urban Wolof of Dakar, which exhibits heavy code-mixing with French. Ronkh was selected as the fieldwork site specifically because it shows less influence from French. 2. Verbal gestures, (para)linguistic clicks, and other sounds We use the term verbal gestures to refer to the set of linguistic elements that are not lexical items per se and include sounds or segments which stand outside a language’s phonemic inventory but are still part of its communicative system. An example in English is the gesture mhmm: it is not a word but is very frequent in conversation, and it is uttered with distinct prosodic contours. Eight different types of mhmm have been identified in Australian English as having "prototypical prosodic shapes. Some are unique to their type, making them identifiable by this criterion alone" (Gardner 2001: 65; see also pp. 252-3). * Lenore A. Grenoble, University of Chicago, grenoble@uchicago.edu; Martina Martinovi´ c, University of Chicago, martinam@uchicago.edu; Rebekah Baglini, University of Chicago, rebekahbrita@uchicago.edu. Research on this project was funded in part by the Dean of the Humanities of the University of Chicago and we are grateful for her support. We are also grateful to Sarah Kopper for her help in elicitation, translation and understanding of Wolof, as well as to our many consultants in Ronkh and Chicago. We thank the audiences at the Workshop on Language Variation and Change at the University of Chicago and at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, where earlier versions of this paper were presented, for useful feedback, as well as the audience at ACAL 44 and two anonymous reviewers. All mistakes are our own. © 2015 Lenore A. Grenoble, Martina Martinovic ´, and Rebekah Baglini. Selected Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, ed. Ruth Kramer et al., 110-121. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.