Sereer Grammar

This is the Wiki page for Serer.

Serer a language of the Senegambian branch of Niger–Congo spoken by 1.2 million people in Senegal and 30,000 in The Gambia. It is the principal language of the Serer people.

Getting started

The handout provided by MediaWiki is below:

• MediaWiki Handbook

In addition to the handbook, a great way to learn how to format Wiki is by poking around Wikipedia, looking for interesting ideas, and clicking the edit button next to them. This is how I figured out how to create sortable lists, for example.

Another question is how we will generate interlinear glosses. The table environment is probably our best bet. This is how most LaTeX glossing packages work.

Ancillary pages

• Serer lexicon

• Recordings and transcriptions

Upload recordings and annotations here.

• Individual session wordlists

This is where wordlists for individual elicitation sessions can be uploaded and checked to avoid redundant work.

Phonology

Serer words are made up of sounds called phonemes. There are many phonemes in Serer.

Phonological inventory

Consonants

A tentative consonant inventory of Serer:

		Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	V'less	p	t̪	t	c	k	q	ʔ
	Voiced	b		d	ɟ	g
	Implosive	ɓ		ɗ	ʄ	ɠ
	Voiceless Implosive	ˀƥ		ˀƭ	ˀƈ	ˀƙ
	Prenasalized	ᵐb		ⁿd	ⁿɟ	ⁿg
Nasal		m		n	ɲ	ŋ
Fricative		f		s			χ
Affricate					tʃ dʒ (?)
Trill				r
Liquid				l
Glide		ʋ/β̞			j

• Spectrograms and Audio Samples of Consonants

Pretty sure that dental t is not a separate phoneme. We haven't seen velar implosives, right? I don't think the palatal affricates and stops are contrastive. Then there's the "implosive l" heard in the word for "swallow." So I would eliminate those 5 phonemes from the chart, and tentatively add an implosive l, but I don't want to delete it without other people's input. These changes are reflected on the new Consonants page.--Jack

Vowels

A tentative vowel inventory of Serer:

			Front	Central	Back
High			i, ɪ		u
Mid			e, ɛ	ə	ɔ, o
Low					a

Serer also has diphthongs: aɪ, oɪ, ɔɪ.

Vowel length is contrastive.

Vowels after implosive consonants are sometimes creaky; this does not seem to be contrastive.

Suprasegmentals

Serer makes use of stress. (?) It is unclear at this point whether it is automatically/metrically assigned to words or if it is lexically specified and unpredictable. Faytak 22:19, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Plural marker χa- (supposing that it is a separate morpheme) seems to attract stress in some instances (e.g. aˈlas "tail", ˈχalas "tails"). Faytak 01:40, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Phonotactics

Serer allows C and nC onsets and codas. Syllables without onsets and open syllables are also allowed. CC clusters are allowed, but no CCC clusters are yet attested.

Loanword Phonology

Borrowed words show phonemes that are not normally present in Serer, like /y/, in the word borrowed from French for 'wall' (etc).

Syntax

Old Pages

- Bari grammar (old main page) - Recordings and transcriptions (Bari) - Bari lexicon