Number marking in Nuer nouns

John Koang Nyang | Addis Ababa University

This paper investigates the formation of number in the nouns of Nuer, a Nilo-Saharan language spoken both in South Sudan and Ethiopia. Forming plurals in Nuer is by itself quite irregular: there are many different ways. Suffixing the [-ni̤] after words that end in sounds other than [l] and [r] is the first way. [l] and [r]take [-i̤] after them, which is the second way. There are also many other ways of forming a plural from singular, including suppletion, vowel shortening, change in vowel quality and internal vowel modification (this last way is quite unpredictable in nature). There is also a null (Ø) formation of plurals with no distinction between singular and plural. Other closely related languages like Dinka (South Sudan) and Anyuak (both Ethiopia and South Sudan), see Reh (1996), share many of the same plural formation processes.

Keywords: Nuer, singular, plural, singulative, suffixation, tone change

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 23 April 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.48.09nya

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