Some Notes on Pulaar

For the past 6 weeks I’ve been studying the Fulakunda dialect of Pulaar. Like I mentioned earlier, Pulaar is spoken throughout West Africa, and this specific dialect is found mainly in southern Senegal and Guinea. Trainees in my stage (training cohort) are learning three different dialects of Pulaar – one found more in the north and another that’s also in south/southeast. I’ve been told that my dialect is sort of the middle ground – slightly easier than the northern version and somewhat more complex than the southern one (Fulakunda speakers like to say that the other southern version – Pullofuta – is what little children speak before they really learn fulakunda). Lucky, this means I’ll be able to understand most of the Pulaar I hear in Senegal, and be understood by a large majority as well. My future town is split between fulakunda and pullofuta speakers, so I’ll likely pick up a hybrid of the two.

The nice thing about Pulaar (my dialect at least), is that there are very few adjectives. Colors beyond black, white and red do not exist in this language. The flip side to this is that there are a huge number of insanely specific verbs. A few examples:

-fiilaade: to tie a headscarf

-lojaade: to have something in your eye

-mumaade: to thumb kernels from corn or millet

-soowude: to be full of weeds

This also means all there are specific verbs that take the place of adjectives, which would be fine except that they follow the opposite rules of most other verbs. I’ll post some good examples as I learn them.

There are also a number of new letters in the Pulaar alphabet. These resemble other letters and sound almost identical, but will change a word’s meaning entirely. We refer to these interlopers as funny b (ƃ), funny d (ƌ), funny y (ƴ), funny n (Ŋ) and Spanish n (ñ). For those of you with an interest in phonetics (Mom), I think the official difference is that these are more explosive than the regular sounds, but I’m still learning to tell the difference.

In order to assess our language learning, we have three LPI’s (language proficiency interviews) during training. In order to swear in as a full-fledged volunteer we need to reach Intermediate-Mid on the language scale – which I successfully did during our second LPI last week, woohoo! My brain finally clicked into Pulaar mode during our last stint at homestay and I feel much more comfortable speaking than I did even a week or two ago. My host mom commeneted, “Koumba went to Kolda and now she speaks Pulaar” and my host dad said that he’s no longer going to speak in French since now I can speak Pulaar. My friend in my language group, Sharon, and I also carried out our first fully Pulaar business transaction with a tailor, which we were very pleased with ourselves for. I know these are little things, but it’s nice to be making progress.