First Pulaar Phrases for Markets

You will not find market dialogues to memorize here, but you will learn how the language around northern markets is named, written and shaped. The Wikipedia page presents Pulaar as one pole of a wide Fula continuum, and that frame helps you listen, read signs and ask for help without guessing.

The Wikipedia page does not publish greeting lists, number tables, bargaining dialogues or direction phrases.

Why does the language have so many names at the stall?

You will hear Pulaar, Pular, Fulfulde, Fula, Fulah, Fulani and Peul, and you can treat them as labels for the same broad language rather than separate languages. Speakers in western dialects call the language Pulaar or Pular, while speakers in central and eastern dialects call it Fulfulde. In English, Fula, Fulah and Fulani come originally from Manding and Hausa, and Peul in French comes from Wolof. Knowing this keeps you from thinking that a new word means a new language when a trader, a driver or a host sibling switches terms.

The page also names the people and the speech forms in their own terms. A person is Pullo and the people are Fulbe, while the language is Pulaar in the west and Fulfulde in the east. The Toucouleur people in the Senegal River Valley speak it as a first language, alongside Fula people from the Senegambia region and Guinea to Cameroon, Nigeria and Sudan. Various peoples also speak it as a second language, such as the Kirdi of northern Cameroon and northeastern Nigeria. That background explains why you can meet fluent speakers who do not identify as Fula.

Is Pulaar the right language for northern Senegal?

In the Senegal River Valley and across Senegambia and Mauritania, the code Pulaar applies, with the individual code fuc for Pulaar in Senegambia and Mauritania. The page lists Pular under the code fuf for Guinea and Sierra Leone, Maasina Fulfulde under ffm for Mali and Ghana, Borgu Fulfulde under fue for Benin and Togo, Western Niger Fulfulde under fuh for Burkina and Niger, Central Eastern Niger Fulfulde under fuq for Niger, Nigerian Fulfulde under fuv for Nigeria, Adamawa Fulfulde under fub for Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria, and Bagirmi Fulfulde under fui for CAR. The inclusive code is ful, with ff in ISO 639-1 and ful in ISO 639-2.

For daily life, the useful point is status rather than codes. Fula is a lingua franca in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Gambia, northeastern Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Burkina Faso, northern Ghana, southern Niger and northern Benin, including Borgou Region where many speakers are bilingual, and a local language in many countries such as Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Togo, CAR, Chad and Sudan. It has official standing in Burkina Faso and Mali and recognized minority status in Cameroon and Niger. If you stay long in the north, the regional guide to languages helps you place Pulaar beside Wolof and other neighboring speeches.

How many people share this speech across the Sahel?

The page gives first language speakers as 37 million for 2014 to 2021 and second language speakers as 2.7 million for 2019. Around 36.8 million people speak it as a set of various dialects in a continuum across some 18 countries in West and Central Africa. The map caption warns that most of these areas, with the exceptions of Senegal and Guinea, are not primarily Fula speaking, because the map shows absolute numbers of speakers.

The same breadth shapes views of unity. Wilson is quoted as saying that travelers over wide distances never find communication impossible, and Ka concludes that despite geographic span and dialect variation, Fulfulde remains fundamentally one language. Ethnologue treats some varieties as separate languages because nine different translations are needed to make the Bible comprehensible for most Fula speakers. For you, the lesson is practical. Expect broad mutual understanding with local color, not a single fixed textbook form.

How do you read Pulaar on signs and phones?

You will meet three working scripts, Latin, Adlam and Arabic in Ajami form. Fula was historically written in Ajami before European colonization by scholars and learned people including Usman dan Fodio and early emirs of the northern Nigeria emirates, and it continues in some areas like Guinea and Cameroon. During the colonial period and after independence, Latin began to be used, with UNESCO supported efforts to standardize transcription from the mid 1960s, including the standard Fulfulde alphabet adopted at the expert meeting in Bamako in March 1966. Two efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to create a unique script, Fula Dita and Fula Ba, did not succeed.

Adlam came later and belongs to the story you can see on phones and classroom posters. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, two teenage brothers, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry from the Nzerekore Region of Guinea, created Adlam, which is written from right to left and includes 28 letters with 5 vowels and 23 consonants. When Pulaar uses Latin, you will see hooked letters that change meaning, Bb with hook, Dd with hook and eng for ng, plus Nj with hook for ny sound and Yy with hook for a glottalized y sound. The letters c, j and r stand for distinct sounds, double vowels mark length, an apostrophe marks a glottal stop, q, v, x and z appear in some loan words, and spelling habits vary, with ʼy for the hooked y in Nigeria and Nn with tilde for the palatal nasal in Senegal. If Wolof signs confuse you, compare them with the first words of Wolof so you stop mixing the two spelling habits.

Why does the same market word change shape?

Fula builds words from verbonominal roots, with suffixes that modify meaning and often do the work that prepositions do in English. The clearest change for a buyer is the noun class system, with 24 to 26 classes common across dialects. Classes 1 and 2 can be seen as personal classes, classes 3 to 6 as diminutive classes, classes 7 to 8 as augmentative classes, and classes 9 to 25 as neutral classes. Gender has no role in the system and marking of gender is done with adjectives rather than class markers. Classes are marked by suffixes on nouns, often with loss of the initial consonant of the suffix.

You do not need to recite classes to buy vegetables, but you can train your ear on the page examples. Laam with the o class means chief and laam with the be class means chiefs, loo with ngel means little pot and loo with nde means storage pot, ullu with ndu means cat and ullu with kon or koy means small cats or kittens, laan with ka means boat, lek with ki means tree, haak with ko means soup, and ndiy with dam means water. Consonant mutation also links singular and plural in most dialects, in pairs such as w with b with mb, r with d with nd, y with j with nj, w with g with ng, f with p, s with c, and h with k. In Pular only nouns show this mutation, not verbs.

What can you listen for when people bargain?

Bargaining turns on voice and pronouns more than loudness. Verbs appear in three voices, active, middle and passive, and not every root is used in all voices. The page gives one root with three forms, lootude to wash something in active voice, lootaade to wash oneself in middle voice, and looteede to be washed in passive voice. When you hear endings shift around a familiar root, you are often hearing who acts and who is affected rather than a new verb.

Pronouns also carry market meaning. Fula has inclusive and exclusive first person plural pronouns, with inclusive forms covering speaker and listener and exclusive forms excluding listeners. The pronoun for a noun follows its class, men and women share the same class so he and she use the same pronoun, and dialects have about 25 classes each with its own pronoun, sometimes with nominative, accusative or dative and possessive forms, while relative pronouns generally match the nominative. You can use this by checking who is included when a seller says a price for us, and by repeating back the noun with its ending instead of stripping it.

How does this Wikipedia entry help after the market?

The Fula language page is an encyclopedia entry on a Senegambian language in the Atlantic geographic group within Niger Congo, alongside related languages such as Serer and Wolof. It states that unlike most other Niger Congo languages, Fula does not have tones. It then sets out names, continuity across dialects, speaker totals, official and minority status, dialect areas, phonology charts, morphology with noun classes and verb voices, pronoun rules and five scripts with alphabet tables.

It also gives a full sample text of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Adlam, Latin and IPA, with the English sense that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Read that sample slowly to fix vowel length and hooked consonants in your ear. Practice reading the hooked letters aloud with a host sibling and ask how the market word changes between one item and many.