Gambian Wolof (EC)
Language-Specific Websites
The My Gambia website is very helpful in learning a few Wolof phrases but is also focused on cultural learning. My Gambia is a tourism-based website that aims to give visitors a foundational understanding of what to say and do when visiting Gambia for the first time. The page also includes YouTube links to My Gambia’s account with helpful tutorials.
The Mofeko website is a great tool for learning basic Gambian Wolof. There are tabs for different themes like greetings and introductions, numbers, days of the week, shopping, etc. Several of the tabs also include audio recordings that allow you to hear how each word should be pronounced which is very helpful.
This Peace Corps website is very extensive. It includes an e-book to read through as well as audio recordings on the side. There is also a pronunciation tool that I have never seen before where you can launch a Dictaphone and record yourself speaking. While this source is mainly Senegalese Wolof I would include this as an advanced tool to compare the similarities and differences between the two languages.
This website is the teaching and research African languages page put together for UCLA. There are several languages included alongside Gambian Wolof. Interestingly, the page does not seem to make a distinction between Senegalese and Gambian Wolof, but I recognized the words to be Gambian. That aside, it includes many videos involving conversations on different topics. The videos seem to be of native speakers which helps learn proper pronunciation. There is also a note that says, “This video preparation was funded by a mini-grant from the National African Language Resource Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Antonia Folarin Schleicher, Director”.
This source is connected to the UCLA website. It is a transcript of the videos from the first link which is incredibly helpful in learning how words are spelled as well as seeing the full conversations without having to pause or slow down the videos. The conversations are also translated into English in the right column.
This website is a local Gambian news page, QTV Wolof News. The news videos are entirely in Wolof so while it is designed for native speakers this would mostly be a resource for an intermediate or advanced learner. Regardless of your language level, listening to how the language is spoken in a professional setting I very interesting and also gives insight into what global news Gambia is paying attention to.
