International Journal of Language & Linguistics

ISSN 2374-8850 (Print), 2374-8869 (Online) DOI: 10.30845/ijll
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Morphophonological Number Marking in Luo

Waryoba Paschal Waryoba Email
Abstract This study discusses morphophonological number marking in Luo, a western Nilotic language spoken in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. Luo, being an agglutinative language, most of its nouns can be easily fragmented into several morphemes, although there are some nouns that are morphologically unmarked for singular or plural. Nilotic languages have shown the connection between morphological morphemes and phonological aspects like tone, vowel length, sound alternation, and change in ATR vowel quality in creating inflection values. This study specifically discusses the impact of both morphological markers and phonological markers of number inflection in Luo. Data collection involved seven Luo native speakers from the Rorya district of Tanzania, where the language is predominantly spoken within the country. The study employed a descriptive research design guided by Distributed Morphology theory. The study also used an elicitation method for data collection. Findings describe suffixation as a dominant number marking process, with processes such as change in syllable coda, internal sound changes, voicing, and devoicing having an inescapable role in unveiling number inflection in both nouns and adjectives. Both suffixation and the aforementioned phonological processes display irregularity when attached to different stems and nouns. The study also discusses the tripartite number marking system in Luo, which is common across Nilotic languages. The system has singulative markers where plural is unmarked, plurative markers where singular is unmarked, and nouns that have both singular markers and plural markers.
Full Text: PDF   |   DOI: https://doi.org/10.30845/ijll.v12p11
Article History:
Received: 9 October 2025 | Accepted: 6 November 2025 | Published: 9 November 2025
Reviewer(s): Dr. Jonida Bushi, University of Tirana, Albania. ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0156-4065. Email: [email protected] Dr. Pinfan Zhu, Texas State University, United States. ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7277-3318. Email: [email protected]
Address for Correspondence: Waryoba Paschal Waryoba, P.O. BOX 306, PEMBA, Tanzania (+255742194791). Email: [email protected]
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