Jola (Joola) or Diola is a dialect continuum spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. It belongs to the Bak branch of the Niger–Congo language family.

Name

The name Jola is an exonym, and may be from the Mandinka word joolaa 'one who pays back'. There is no widespread endonym used by all of the Jola speakers.

Languages

The primary branches of Jola proper and to some extent Central Jola are not mutually intelligible. The main varieties are:

Bayot

Bayot, spoken around Ziguinchor, is grammatically Jola, apart from a non-Jola pronominal system. However, perhaps half its vocabulary is non-Jola and even non-Atlantic. It may therefore be a language isolate with substantial Jola borrowing (relexification). In any case, Bayot is clearly distinct from (other) Jola languages.

Reconstruction

Some Proto-Joola reconstructions of stable lexical roots by Segerer (2016) are: