Can a language endanger itself?

This chapter presents a case study of how Wolof has cohabited the linguistic ecology of urban Senegal with a colonial language, French, over the past three hundred years. Specifically, it explores how this contact has reshaped the repertoire, giving rise to a way of speaking that scholars have dubbed ‘urban Wolof,’ and how urban Wolof has diverged from other dialects of the language. The fact that Wolof became an urban language has contributed to its expansion, but also to its hybridity, leading to a situation in which it has been perceived as both a threat to minority languages within Senegal, and as an endangered language, because of its increasingly mixed nature. This chapter presents a brief history of urban Wolof, as well as a means of reconceptualizing it as a practice rather than a language, followed by a discussion of how hybridity plays into questions of language ideology in the Senegalese context to answer the question of whether a language can endanger itself.