Morphological Complexity in Nuer

A notorious complicating factor in language comes from inflectional morphology, which is all the more striking because some languages have it and others do not. In English, for example, verbs inflect, and alongside a form such as 'sing', a speaker must know 'sings', 'sang', 'sung' and 'singing'. In Mandarin Chinese, where verbs do not inflect, a speaker only needs to know one form (chàng). But inflection is not just a matter of learning multiple forms -- speakers also need to negotiate a network of unpredictable and ambiguous relationships. For instance, English speakers do not just need to know that a verb must have a simple past tense form, they need to know that the past tense forms of 'sing', 'fling', 'bring' and 'ping' are all constructed in different ways ('sang', 'flung', 'brought' and 'pinged'), and that while 'sang' and 'hang' rhyme, one is a past tense form and the other present. While the inflectional system of English is still fairly simple, in other languages things may get considerably more complex.

One of the world's most extreme examples comes from Nuer, a language of the West Nilotic branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family, mainly spoken in the Republic of South Sudan. This complexity is not due so much to a large number of forms, but rather to their unpredictability and internal structure. This can be clearly seen in the case suffixes. On the face of it, the system is quite simple. There just two suffixes, -ka in the singular and -ni in the plural. But their behaviour is quite baffling, because their meaning varies according to the individual noun; for example, -ni can function as a genitive case suffix for some nouns, as a locative case for others, or as both, or even as a general plural suffix with no case-marking function at all. Speakers must learn how to use and recognize these forms, and select the correct function from this range of competing options. Besides suffixation, nouns may also inflect through various internal changes, as with English 'foot' versus 'feet'. But in Nuer this goes well beyond such vocalic alternations, and takes advantage of a rich system of prosodic features such as length, tone, and phonation type (breathy voice versus creaky voice). As with the suffixes, it is not possible to establish a fixed function for these features. For example, the genitive case of 'cow' is formed by vowel lengthening (yang ~ yaang) while that of 'person' is formed by shortening (raan ~ ran). Taken together, the patterns of suffixation and word-internal changes constitute a system whose complexity is matched by few languages in the world. This is of major interest both to the study of language and of cognition more generally, because the reigning linguistic and psychological models of inflection are based on systems which are considerably simpler.

But while we know enough about the language to appreciate the challenges it poses, we lack any detailed information. Very little about it is known about Nuer outside the speech community, and the existing descriptions are sketchy at best. Therefore, in this project we aim to produce the first comprehensive description of the inflectional morphology of Nuer, based on original fieldwork, at the same time illuminating aspects of its sound system, syntax and historical development. Alongside the structural complexities of the system, the prosodic system poses particular descriptive challenges of its own, in which the overlapping effects of tone, phonation type and the typologically unusual three-way vowel length distinction must be untangled through careful acoustic measurements. The results of this investigation will be important to students of language and the human mind, and will also have value to the speaker community in the development of orthographic standards, an ongoing process in the newly independent South Sudan.

The project design incorporates a range of activities that will have demonstrable social and cultural benefits for the Nuer speaking communities in South Sudan and elsewhere, including the UK diaspora.

The Nuer form the second largest speech community of the new Republic of South Sudan, and education in indigenous languages has been a stated priority of the government of this new country. Development of a standard orthographic system is an essential step in the pursuit of activities involving community-led indigenous language maintenance (Lüpke 2011) such as dictionary writing (Mosel 2011) and curriculum development (Coronel-Molina and McCarty 2011). The production of resources of this kind is a precursor to increasing human capital, thereby creating pathways to the economic benefits associated with education.

Opportunities for attaining literacy in Nuer are currently very scarce. This is a reflection of a lack of resources; e.g. there are no dictionaries or grammar books, only some elementary primers. The problem is compounded by the lack of consistent orthographic standardization across texts. Currently a variety of writing systems are in circulation, none of which provide more than an approximate representation of the language. In particular, the prosodic features that play so crucial a role in the inflectional system, as well as the lexicon, have only ever been partially represented in writing.

Through careful linguistic analysis, our research has a clear potential to benefit the speaker community by addressing issues pertinent to resource development:

(i) Our acoustic and phonological analyses based on data collected in South Sudan and London will feed directly into recommendations for the development of orthographic standards.
(ii) The corpus of noun and verb paradigms elicited will form a solid basis for the development of a Nuer-English dictionary (and grammar).

Steps taken to feed our resources into an orthography development programme will be made through engagement with South Sudan-based community groups involved in literacy, as well as the Summer Institute of Linguistics (South Sudan branch). To facilitate the dissemination of our findings to stakeholders interested in participating in literacy development we will hold a workshop in Juba in the final year of the project. The goal of the workshop will be to facilitate and stimulate community-led work in this area. The workshop will create a network between elders, local community leaders, local linguists and teachers to provide a forum for discussion of key issues related to the development and implementation of a standardized script. We will also use this opportunity to discuss appropriate steps to provide literacy support and encourage its use among Nuer speakers.

Audio and video recordings of spontaneous texts, including narratives and songs will be made available (given appropriate permissions) to the online Nuer community through a web portal established for the dissemination for our proposed research on Nuer. In addition to forming a research tool for grammatical analysis and numerous potential applied uses, these texts act as a digital linguistic and cultural resource for Nuer in the diaspora, including individuals who identify as cultural Nuer, but do not speak the language. It is our particular desire that the availability of these resources will help to reinforce community identity and prestige among the UK Nuer speaking community, which so far lacks the resources and organization found in communities in North America and Australia.