The Lopit language is an
Eastern Nilotic language spoken by around 100,000 people in
Eastern Equatoria State,
South Sudan
South Sudan (; din, Paguot Thudän), officially the Republic of South Sudan ( din, Paankɔc Cuëny Thudän), is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered by Ethiopia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the ...
.
[ Lopit is part of the Lotuko-Teso subfamily and is related to Lotuko, Turkana and Maasai.][ Lopit is a VSO language and has a complex tonal system.
The Lopit language has six different dialects: Ngabori, spoken by the Ngaboli sub-community; Dorik, spoken by the Dorik sub-community; Ngotira, spoken by the Ngotira sub-community; Lomiaha, spoken by the Lomiaha sub-community; Lohutok, spoken by the Lohutok sub-community, and Lolongo, spoken by the Lolongo sub-community. Some small sub-communities or villages (for instance Loming, Ahado, Oriaju, Hidonge and Atarangi) also speak Lotuko due to their proximity to the neighboring Lotuko communities. The dialects have similar segmental phonologies with minor vowel and consonant shifts, and also some tonal variations. Lopit speakers generally group the dialects into Northern Lopit and Southern Lopit.]
Phonology
Lopit is a tonal language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
with 3 tones: high, falling and low.
Vowels
Lopit has 5 vowels: a, e, i, o, u.
Consonants
Grammar
Vowel Harmony
Lopit has vowel harmony for prepositions. Prepositions have the suffix /o/ with vowels /o, u/, /e/ with /e, i/, and /a/ with /a/.
Gender
Lopit has grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns ...
: all nouns belong to either the feminine or masculine gender, but most nouns are not marked overtly for gender. Gender is instead mostly indicated via agreement marking on relative pronouns, demonstratives and possessives.
For some family terms, birds and animals, and agentive nouns, gender is marked with the /lɔ-/ for masculine and either /ɪ-/ or /na/- for feminine.
The masculine gender is largely used for male people, male animals, small creatures and objects. The feminine gender is mostly used for everything else. If a speaker wants to indicate that something is especially large, they can refer to it as feminine, and vice versa for things that are especially small. This makes Lopit fairly unique, as usually the masculine gender is used to denote larger things and is more common than the feminine gender in Eastern Nilotic languages.
References
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Eastern Nilotic languages
Languages of South Sudan
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