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TheSenegambian languages, traditionally known as theNorthern West Atlantic, sometimes confusingly referred to in literature as theAtlantic languages, are a branch ofAtlantic–Congo languages most commonly spoken inSenegal and neighboring southernMauritania,The Gambia,Guinea-Bissau, andGuinea. The nomadicFula people have also spread their languages from Senegal across the western and centralSahel. The most populous unitary language isWolof, the national language of Senegal, with four million native speakers and millions more second-language users. There are perhaps 13 million speakers of the various varieties ofFula, and over a million speakers ofSerer^{[citation needed]}. The most prominent feature of the Senegambian languages is that they are devoid oftone, unlike the vast majority ofAtlantic-Congo languages.

David Sapir (1971) proposed aWest Atlantic branch of the Niger–Congo languages that included a Northern branch largely synonymous with Senegambian. However, Sapir's West Atlantic and its branches turned out to be geographic and typological rather than genealogical groups. The only investigation since then, Segerer & Pozdniakov (2010, 2017), removed the Southern Atlantic languages. The remaining (Northern or Senegambian) languages are characterized by a lack of tone. The Serer–Fulani–Wolof branch is characterized byconsonant mutation.

Serer and Fula share noun-class suffixes.

The inclusion of the poorly attested Nalu languages is uncertain.

Several classifications, including the one used byEthnologue 20, show Fula as being more closely related to Wolof than it is to Serer, due to a copy error in the literature.^{[citation needed]}

TheMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology classifies the Senegambian languages under the nameNorth-Central Atlantic in itsGlottolog database.^[1]

The Senegambian languages are well known for theirconsonant mutation, a phenomenon in which the initial consonant of a word changes depending on itsmorphological and/orsyntactic environment. In Fula, for example, the initial consonant of many nouns changes depending on whether it is singular or plural:

pul-lo	"Fulani person"	ful-ɓe	"Fulani people"
guj-jo	"thief"	wuy-ɓe	"thieves"

The West Atlantic languages are defined by theirnoun-class systems, which are similar to those found in other Niger–Congo languages, most famously theBantu languages. Most West Atlantic, and indeed Niger–Congo, noun-class systems are marked with prefixes, and linguists generally believe that this reflects the proto-Niger–Congo system. The languages of the Fula–Serer branch of Senegambian, however, have noun-classsuffixes or combinations of prefixes and suffixes. Joseph Greenberg argued that the suffixed forms arose from independent postposeddeterminers that agreed with the noun class:

CL-Noun CL-Det → CL-Noun-CL → Noun-CL

Comparison of basic vocabulary words of the Senegambian languages:^[2]

• Sapir, David. 1971. "West Atlantic: An Inventory of the Languages, Their Noun-class Systems and Consonant Alternation". In Sebeok, ed,Current Trends in Linguistics, 7:Linguistics in Sub-Saharan Africa., 45–112. Mouton.
• Pozdniakov, Konstantin & Segerer, Guillaume (2017)."A Genealogical classification of Atlantic languages." (Draft) To appear in: Lüpke, Friederike (ed.)The Oxford guide to the Atlantic languages of West Africa: Oxford:Oxford University Press.
• Pozdniakov, Konstantin. 2022. Proto-Fula–Sereer: Lexicon, morphophonology, and noun classes. (Niger-Congo Comparative Studies 3). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5820515 .https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/325. Open Access.

• Senegambian languages
• Atlantic languages

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