Moro Language Project

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Moro is a Kordofanian language spoken in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan in Sudan. Kordofanian languages have received little attention in the linguistics literature and constitute one of the most poorly described and threatened language families in Africa. The current project aims to fill this void by producing a descriptive grammar, analytical papers, and a dictionary focusing on Thetogovela, a previously undescribed dialect of Moro. Research to date reveals that many phenomena in Moro present intriguing challenges for linguistic analysis, and provide new data for grammatical typology and relationships between Kordofanian and other Niger-Congo languages. Several especially noteworthy phenomena are: (1) the status of tone in Moro, a previously disputed aspect of the language, which is shown to interact with word formation and sentence structure, (2) a complex verb system that displays several distinctive methods of marking grammatical subjects and objects, and (3) a striking set of properties connecting relative clauses and questions. The project involves close collaboration between speakers of the Moro community, the principal investigators and graduate students, and will make a lasting contribution to African linguistics.