The principal dialect of Dakar, for instance, is an urban mixture of Wolof, French, and Arabic.

Variants include the older French Ouolof, Jollof, or Jolof, which now typically refers either to the Jolof Empire or to jollof rice, a common West African rice dish.

In the whole region from Dakar to Saint-Louis, and also west and southwest of Kaolack, Wolof is spoken by the vast majority of people.

Typically when various ethnic groups in Senegal come together in cities and towns, they speak Wolof.

In the final place, geminate consonants may be followed by a faint epenthetic schwa vowel.

Of the consonants in the chart above, p d c k do not occur in the intermediate or final position, being replaced by f r s and zero, though geminate pp dd cc kk are common.

Minimal pairs:[15][16] Unlike most sub-Saharan African languages, Wolof has no tones.

Other non-tonal languages of sub-Saharan Africa include Amharic, Swahili and Fula.

The complete alphabet is A, À, B, C, D, E, É, Ë, F, G, I, J, K, L, M, N, Ñ, Ŋ, O, Ó, P, Q, R, S, T, U, W, X, Y.

[17][18][19] Wolof is most often written in this orthography, in which phonemes have a clear one-to-one correspondence to graphemes.

[20] This alphabet has been used since pre-colonial times, as the first writing system to be adopted for Wolof, and is still used by many people, mainly Imams and their students in Quranic and Islamic schools.

To express different tenses or aspects of an action, personal pronouns are conjugated – not the verbs.

A speaker may express that an action absolutely took place in the past by adding the suffix -(w)oon to the verb (in a sentence, the temporal pronoun is still used in a conjugated form along with the past marker): Demoon naa Ndakaaru.

Verbs are not inflected; instead pronouns are used to mark person, aspect, tense, and focus.

Any loan noun from French or English uses -bi: butik-bi, xarit-bi "the boutique, the friend."

Four nouns referring to persons use -ki/-ñi: nit-ki, nit-ñi, "the person, the people" Plural nouns use -yi: jigéen-yi, butik-yi, "the girls, the boutiques" Miscellaneous articles: "si, gi, wi, mi, li."

For example, two is ñaar and second is ñaaréél The one exception to this system is "first", which is bu njëk (or the adapted French word premier: përëmye) In urban Wolof, it is common to use the forms of the 3rd person plural also for the 1st person plural.

The New Testament was translated into Wolof and published in 1987, second edition 2004, and in 2008 with some minor typographical corrections.

[28] The 1994 song "7 Seconds" by Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry is partially sung in Wolof.

[31] Here are some of those proverbs: In the appendix to his Folktales from the Gambia, Emil Magel, a professor of African literature and of Swahili,[32] included the Wolof text of the story of "The Donkeys of Jolof," "Fari Mbam Ci Rew i Jolof"[33] accompanied by an English translation.

[34] In his Grammaire de la Langue Woloffe published in 1858, David Boilat, a Senegalese writer and missionary,[35] included a selection of Wolof proverbs, riddles and folktales accompanied by French translations.

[36] Du Tieddo au Talibé by Lilyan Kesteloot and Bassirou Dieng, published in 1989,[37] is a collection of traditional tales in Wolof with French translations.