Turkana language

Turkana
Ng'aturk(w)ana
Native to	Kenya
Region	Northwest Kenya, west of Lake Turkana
Native speakers	990,000 (2009 census)[1] not counting Nyangatom
Language family	Nilo-Saharan? Eastern Sudanic Eastern Nilotic Lotuxo–Teso Teso–Turkana Turkana Turkana
Dialects	Nyangatom
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tuv (not counting Nyangatom)
Glottolog	turk1308[2]

Turkana /tɜːrˈkɑːnə/^[3] is the language of the Turkana people of Kenya, numbering about 340,000.

It is one of the Eastern Nilotic languages, and is closely related to Karamojong, Jie and Teso of Uganda, to Toposa spoken in the extreme southeast of Sudan, and to Nyangatom in the Sudan/Ethiopia Omo valley borderland; these languages together form the cluster of Teso–Turkana languages.

The collective group name for these related group is Ateker.

Selected Vocabulary

English	Turkana singular form	Turkana plural form
face	ereet	ngiReetin
body	akwaan	ngaWat
clothes	eworu	ngiWorui
food	akimuj	ngaMuja
tobacco	etaba	ngiTab
goat	akine	ngaKinei
cattle	aite	ngaAtuk
donkey	esikiria	ngiSikiria
camel	ekaal	ngiKaala
water	akipe	ngaKipi

Bibliography

• Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. (1983) The Turkana language. Dordrecht: Foris. ISBN 90-70176-83-1
• Barrett, A. (1988) English–Turkana dictionary. Nairobi: MacMillan Kenya. ISBN 0-333-44577-5
• Barrett, A. (1990) Turkana–English dictionary. London: MacMillan. ISBN 0-333-53654-1

References

1. Turkana at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Turkana". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
3. Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student’s Handbook, Edinburgh

External links

• PanAfriL10n page on Teso & Turkana