Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Oko group (Benue-Congo family).

Languages included: Oko [oko-oko].

DATA SOURCES

Atoyebi 2009 = Atoyebi, Joseph Dele. A Reference Grammar of Oko. PhD Thesis: Leipzig University. // A detailed description of the phonology and grammar of Oko, well illustrated by lexical, syntactic, and textual examples, but without any accompanying glossaries.

Jungraithmayr 1973 = Jungraithmayr, Hermann. 1973. Eine Wortliste des Oko, der Sprache von Ogori (Nigeria). Africana marburgensia 6(2): 58-66. // A 110-item Swadesh-type wordlist for Oko, collected by the author himself. First ever publication on this language.

NOTES

1. General.

The Oko (Ọ̀kọ) language, also known as Oko-Eni-Osayen, is spoken by approximately 40,000 speakers in Nigeria's Kogi State (around the towns of Ogori and Magongo). According to [Atoyebi 2009], there are only two dialects of the language (Oko/Ogori and Osanyen/Magongo), and the differences between them are mainly phonetic. In terms of classification, Oko is typically grouped together with Nupoid and Idomoid languages within Benue-Congo, without, however, forming part of either. For this reason, the language is formally treated as an isolate for now.

The most recent and accurate source on Oko is a reference grammar by J. D. Atoyebi [2009]; however, lexical data has to be elicited from grammatical illustrations and sample texts rather than glossaries, which inevitably results in numerous gaps. Because of this, the resulting wordlist has to be put together from two different sources, the other one being an older wordlist collected by H. Jungraithmayr. The two sources show occasional phonetic discrepancies, but only two principal discrepancies in basic lexicon have been noticed ('bite' and 'tree'), so on the whole, the data remain compatible.

2. Transliteration.

Atoyebi's data are transcribed in regular IPA, requiring only the usual cosmetic adaptations to UTS (tʃ, dʒ > ɕ, ʓ; j > y). Jungraithmayr's transcription is slightly more obscure (no separate phonological table is adduced in the paper); for instance, he differentiates between r and ṛ, without explaining whether they are phonetic variants or even what the precise phonetic value of the latter is. Since the two are not distinguished in Atoyebi's transcription at all, we ignore this difference when transliterating Jungraithmayr.

Database compiled and annotated by: G. Starostin (last update: May 2018).