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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.

1. a syllabic /m/
2. an archiphoneme that only appears stem-initially

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.

Orthography

The Oku alphabet has 25 letters.

References

1. Oku at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. ^ Davis, Leslie Kim (December 1992). A Segmental Phonology of the Oku Language (PDF) (MA thesis). University of Texas at Arlington. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2023-12-12.
3. Blood & Davis 1999.

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.

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