Oku language

Oku
Kuɔ
Native to	Cameroon
Native speakers	87,000 (from the 2005 census)
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Southern Bantoid Grassfields Ring Center Oku
Language codes
ISO 639-3	oku
Glottolog	okuu1243

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.

Phonology

Consonants

Oku has 21 consonant phonemes. The consonant phoneme inventory of the language is shown below.

		Labial		Alveolar		Palatal	Velar
							Plain	Labialized
Stop/Affricate	voiceless			/t/		/t͡ʃ/	/k/	/kʷ/
	voiced	/b/		/d/		/d͡ʒ/	/g/	/gʷ/
Fricative	voiceless	/f/		/s/
	voiced						/ɣ/	/ɣʷ/
Nasal		/m/	/m̩/	/n/	//N//		/ŋ/
Lateral				/l/
Glide						/j/		/w/

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/.

Vowels

Davis describes the following vowels in her thesis.

		Front		Back
				Unrounded		Rounded
High	Tense	/i/	/iː/			/u/	/uː/
	Lax	/ɪ/	/ɪː/
Mid	Tense			/ə/	/əː/
	Lax	/ɛ/	/ɛː/			/ɔ/	/ɔː/
Low				/ɑ/	/ɑː/

Orthography

The Oku alphabet has 25 letters.

a

b

ch

d

dz

e

ɛ

ə

f

g

gh

i

j

k

l

m

n

ŋ

o

p

s

t

w

y

z

Further reading

• 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. Retrieved March 2, 2018.