#wolof

Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry - 7 Seconds 1994

Youssou N'Dour is a Senegalese singer, songwriter, musician, composer, occasional actor, businessman, and politician. From April 2012 to September 2013, he was Senegal's Minister of Tourism. N'Dour helped develop a style of popular Senegalese music known by all Senegambians (including the Wolof) as mbalax, a genre that has sacred origins in the Serer music njuup tradition and ndut initiation ceremonies. He is the subject of the award-winning films Return to Gorée (2007) directed by Pierre-Yves Borgeaud and Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love (2008) directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. In 2006, N'Dour was cast as Olaudah Equiano in the film Amazing Grace.

"7 Seconds" is a song N'Dour wrote and performed together with Swedish-Sierra Leonean singer-songwriter Neneh Cherry. The song is trilingual as N'Dour sings in three languages: French, English and the West African language Wolof. The title and refrain of the song refers to the first moments of a child's life; as Cherry put it, "not knowing about the problems and violence in our world". N'Dour featured the song on his seventh studio album, The Guide (Wommat) (1994), while Cherry included it on her 1996 album Man.

It was a worldwide hit, peaking within the top 10 of the charts in several countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Paraguay and the UK. It climbed to the top position in Finland, France, Iceland, Italy and Switzerland. It stayed at number one for 16 consecutive weeks on the French Singles Chart, which was the record for the most weeks at the top position at the time. On the Eurochart Hot 100, the song reached number two. It won the MTV Europe Music Award in the category for Best Song of 1994.

"7 Seconds" received a total of 45,3% yes votes. :'(

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Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural Africans into a wide variety of styles and subgenres, with regional variations across the United States. Although blues (as it is now known) can be seen as a musical style based on both European harmonic structure and the African call-and-response tradition that transformed into an interplay of voice and guitar, the blues form itself bears no resemblance to the melodic styles of the West African griots. Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure structure of the blues might have its origins in the Native American tradition of pow wow drumming. Some scholars identify strong influences on the blues from the melodic structures of certain West African musical styles of the savanna and sahel. Lucy Durran finds similarities with the melodies of the Bambara people, and to a lesser degree, the Soninke people and Wolof people, but not as much of the Mandinka people. Gerard Kubik finds similarities to the melodic styles of both the west African savanna and central Africa, both of which were sources of enslaved people.

No specific African musical form can be identified as the single direct ancestor of the blues. However the call-and-response format can be traced back to the music of Africa. That blue notes predate their use in blues and have an African origin is attested to by "A Negro Love Song", by the English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, from his African Suite for Piano, written in 1898, which contains blue third and seventh notes.

The Diddley bow (a homemade one-stringed instrument found in parts of the American South sometimes referred to as a jitterbug or a one-string in the early twentieth century) and the banjo are African-derived instruments that may have helped in the transfer of African performance techniques into the early blues instrumental vocabulary. The banjo seems to be directly imported from West African music. It is similar to the musical instrument that griots and other Africans such as the Igbo played (called halam or akonting by African peoples such as the Wolof, Fula and Mandinka). However, in the 1920s, when country blues began to be recorded, the use of the banjo in blues music was quite marginal and limited to individuals such as Papa Charlie Jackson and later Gus Cannon.

Blues music also adopted elements from the "Ethiopian airs", minstrel shows and Negro spirituals, including instrumental and harmonic accompaniment. The style also was closely related to ragtime, which developed at about the same time, though the blues better preserved "the original melodic patterns of African music"

I had to separate the legend from the map because otherwise, it would not have been legible. I am aware that the color distinctions are not always very clear, but there are only so many colors in the palette.

The legend is arranged in alphabetical order, and languages are grouped by family. Branches are represented by bullet points in which the languages within them are colored.

Afroasiatic

Chadic (Hausa): ochre

Cushitic (Oromo and Somali): light yellow-green

Semitic (Arabic to Tigrinya): yellow

Albanian: olive green

Armenian: mauve

Atlantic-Congo

Benue-Congo (Chewa to Zulu): blue-green

Senegambian (Fula and Wolof): faded blue-green

Volta-Congo (Ewe and Mooré): bright blue-green

Austroasiatic (Khmer and Vietnamese): dark blue-purple

Austronesian

Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (Fijian to Wallisian): dark brown

Malayo-Polynesian (Palauan): bright brown

Western Malayo-Polynesian (Malagasy to Tagalog): light brown

Eastern Sudanic (Dinka): foral white

Hellenic (Greek): black

Indo-European

Germanic (Danish to Swedish): light blue

English-based creoles (Antiguan and Barbudan to Vincentian Creole): medium/dark blue

Indo-Aryan (Bengali to Sinhala): purple

Iranian (Persian): gray

Romance (Catalan to Spanish) — red

French-based creoles (Haitian Creole to Seychellois Creole): dark red under French

Portuguese-based creoles (Cape Verdean Creole to Papiamento): dark red under Portuguese

Slavic — light green (Bulgarian to Ukrainian)

Inuit (Greenlandic): white

Japonic (Japanese): blanched almond

Kartvelian (Georgian): faded blue

Koreanic (Korean): yellow-orange

Kra-Dai (Lao and Thai): dark orange

Mande (Bambara to Mandinka): magenta/violet

Mongolic (Mongolian): red-brown

Sino-Tibetan (Burmese, Chinese*, and Dzongkha): pink

Turkic (Azerbaijani to Uzbek): dark green

Uralic

Balto-Finnic (Estonian and Finnish): light orange

Ugric (Hungarian): salmon