Jola (Joola) or Diola is a dialect continuum spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau.
The name Jola is an exonym, and may be from the Mandinka word joolaa 'one who pays back'.
The main varieties are: Bayot, spoken around Ziguinchor, is grammatically Jola, apart from a non-Jola pronominal system.
It may therefore be a language isolate with substantial Jola borrowing (relexification).
Some Proto-Joola reconstructions of stable lexical roots by Segerer (2016) are:[2]