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Things to know about Wolof

Wolof is the native language of the Wolof ethnic group in West Africa. Today, Wolof is spoken primarily in Senegal, The Gambia, and Mauritania. Most speakers live in Senegal, where Wolofs make up the largest ethnic group. Wolof is also widely learned as a second language, allowing it to serve as an important lingua franca for communication between ethnic groups.

Typing Wolof Characters

Wolof is written in a variation of the Latin alphabet that includes several special characters. There are two methods for typing these characters.

The simplest method is to use the character suggestions. To do so, type the base character for the letter you want, then select that character from the set of special characters which appears.

The other method is to use the virtual keyboard with the layout set to Wolof. (If necessary, you can change the layout by clicking Settings and selecting an option in the Keyboard Language menu.)

Locate the character you want on the virtual keyboard, then click on it or press the corresponding key on your physical keyboard. Capital letters, numbers, and certain punctuation marks (including the period and the question mark) are available by holding down the Shift key. For some special characters, such as é, ñ, and ŋ, the capital versions are on different keys than the lowercase versions.

See Typing Accents and Special Characters for details on both typing methods.


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