Soo language


Soo or So is the Kuliak language of the Tepes people of northeastern Uganda. The language is moribund, with most of the population of 5,000 having shifted to Karamojong, and only a few dozen elderly individuals are still able to speak Soo. Soo is divided into three major dialects: Tepes, Kadam, and Napak.
There are between 3,000 and 10,000 ethnic Soo people. They were historically hunter-gatherers, but have recently shifted to pastoralism and subsistence farming like their Nilotic and Bantu neighbors. Beer found that most So villages have only one speaker remaining. Thus, the speakers rarely have a chance to active use the Soo language.

Dialects

Soo dialects are spoken on the slopes of the following three mountains in east-central Uganda just to the north of Mount Elgon.
There are fewer than 60 elderly speakers of all three dialects combined.
Carlin notes that there are only minor differences between the Tepes and Kadam dialects, which are mutually intelligible.

Grammar

So grammar has been described by Beer, et al..
Word order is VSO. So has rich verbal morphology.

Pronouns

So nominative and accusative pronouns are:
SingularPlural
1stajainja/izja
2ndbijabitja
3rdicaiɟa

Interrogatives

So interrogatives are:
There are four verb tenses:
Some So affixes are:
Singular suffixes are /-at/, /an/, /-ɛn/, and /-it/.
Plural suffixes are /-in/, /-ɛk/, /-ɛz/, /-an/, /-ɛl/, /-ra/, /-ce/, /-ɔt/, and /-e/.