Number Marking in Urhobo and Ukwuani: A Comparative Study

Abstract: Urhobo is an Edoid language spoken mainly in Delta. Ukwuani, on the other hand, is an Igboid language spoken in Delta state also. Both languages share common boundaries. As a result of the boundary they share and the intermarriage relationship between them, some Obiaruku natives speak Urhobo, as some Urhobo people especially around Abraka and Orogun, also speak Ukwuani. This has led to language contact, introducing innovations into these two languages. The present paper aims to provide a comparative account of the number marking strategies in Urhobo and Ukwuani. The paper is based on data collected from native speakers of Ukwuani and Urbobo who are between the ages of 40 and 85 years. The data was collected using the Ibadan 400 wordlist of basic vocabularies. However, only one hundred of the 400 were used, restricting the words to nominal elements for which singular-plural pairs can be collected. The analysis of data is descriptive. The lexical items collected were also tested in a phrase frame to see if they share concord marking with their modifiers. We found that Urhobo uses prefixes a-, o- or ?-, u-, eor ?- and i- to indicate numbers, while Ukwuani uses the quantifier mìkpoìkpoì to indicate plurality.