Oku language
Oku (Ebkuo, Ekpwo, Ukfwo, Bvukoo, Kuɔ) is a Grassfields Bantoid language that is primarily spoken by the Oku people of northwest Cameroon, a fondom of the Tikar people. They are a different ethnic group from the Oku people of Sierra Leone.
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| Oku |
|---|
| Kuɔ |
| Cameroon |
| 87,000 (from the 2005 census) |
| Niger–Congo? |
Atlantic–CongoBenue–CongoSouthern BantoidGrassfieldsRingCenterOku | | oku | | okuu1243 |
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Oku (Ebkuo, Ekpwo, Ukfwo, Bvukoo, Kuɔ) is a Grassfields Bantoid language that is primarily spoken by the Oku people of northwest Cameroon, a fondom of the Tikar people. They are a different ethnic group from the Oku people of Sierra Leone.
Oku has 21 consonant phonemes. The consonant phoneme inventory of the language is shown below.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| /t/ | /t͡ʃ/ | /k/ | /kʷ/ | |||
| /b/ | /d/ | /d͡ʒ/ | /g/ | /gʷ/ | ||
| /f/ | /s/ | |||||
| /ɣ/ | /ɣʷ/ | |||||
| /m/ | /m̩/ | /n/ | //N// | /ŋ/ | ||
| /l/ | ||||||
| /j/ | /w/ |
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Davis argues that Oku has five nasal phonemes. These are three non-syllabic nasals (/m/, /n/, and /ŋ/), syllabic /m̩/, and archiphonemic //N//. /m̩/ does not assimilate to the following consonant. However //N// assimilates before all consonants except /f/, /t͡ʃ/, and /d͡ʒ/, where it becomes /n/.
Davis describes the following vowels in her thesis.
| Front | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| /i/ | /iː/ | /u/ | /uː/ | ||
| /ɪ/ | /ɪː/ | ||||
| /ə/ | /əː/ | ||||
| /ɛ/ | /ɛː/ | /ɔ/ | /ɔː/ | ||
| /ɑ/ | /ɑː/ |
The Oku alphabet has 25 letters.
- Blood, Cynthia L.; Davis, Leslie (1999). Oku- English Provisional Lexicon (PDF). Yaoundé: SIL. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-03-15.
- Nforbi, Emmanuel (April 1993). Oku Verb Morphology: Tense Aspect and Mood (PDF) (post-graduate diploma thesis). University of Yaoundé I.
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