Consonants

Below are the consonants of Koro.

Phonemes to the left of a cell are voiceless while phonemes to the right are voiced with the exception of the glottal fricatives which are both voiceless.

The information from the chart above was collected from the most recent research done on the consonants of Koro. However, there are a few discrepancies of information between recent research and past research.

In Geissler’s work (2013), the articulation of /ʋ/ exists and can sound similar to /v/ or /w/ depending on the speaker. There is a possibility that the articulation of /ʔ/ is not a phoneme in Koro. While a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another, data suggests that /ʔ/ is instead used for other unidentified roles. For example, it can be used to separate vowels, such as [ma.leʔe.tɨŋ] which means ‘fast boy.’ In other examples, /ʔ/ disappears from phrases. The word ‘that’ in Koro is [baʔ], but strangely, the glottal stop disappears in the word [ba ŋɨn] which means ‘that house’.^[12]

In Anderson’s work (2010), there exists an aspirated ph or /ɸ/. It is possible that Anderson’s data may have been influenced by the differences in speech between natives or the Hindi language used by his informants. In addition, his research does not include words that have no vowels in between consonants, but Blench argues that there are words with no vowels, resulting from the influence of the Hruso language spoken nearby. For example, the word ‘woman’ is ‘msn’ in Koro.^[13]

There is a complementary distribution between the alveolar trill /r/ and the alveolar flap /ɾ/. The trill /r/ is heard in the beginning or end of a word while the flap /ɾ/ is heard in the middle of the word.^[11]

Vowels

Below are the vowels of Koro.

Koro has two confirmed types of vowels: oral and nasalized. There are very few diphthongs, such as -aj and -ej.^[15] The existence of long vowels is uncertain; while Blench (2018) proposes that long vowels exist,^[14] Anderson (2010) argues that only the long vowel a: might exist.^[16]

Syllables

Koro words can have one or multiple syllables in them. The commonly seen syllable is CV, but there are plenty of other syllable structures in Koro such as CVC, CCV, and CCVC.^[16]

There are usually three parts to a syllable: the onset, the nucleus, and the coda. The nucleus is usually a vowel, and the onset and the coda are consonants that come before or after the nucleus, respectively. Onsetless syllables, which are syllables that begin with a vowel, exist in Koro, but they do not have a coda. For a coda to exist, the syllable must have an onset. The observed rule is that onsets can have a maximum of two consonants while codas can have only one. In addition, nasal vowels and codas do not occur simultaneously together.^[17]

Nouns

Koro nouns can be formed with suffixes. For example, there are many common animal names that have the suffix ‘-le’ in the last syllable of each word.^[18]

However, this is not always the case because in some words, the suffix ‘-le’ may not be present for an animal name or is present for another name that is not animal related.

The suffix -me is a plural marker for pronouns and, depending on the Koro speaker, for living things.^[18]

The suffix ‘-gɨ’ is used to show possession, usually around a pronoun. This element may not be Koro’s alone but a cognate of other Tibeto-Burman languages as well.^[20]

Pronouns in Koro have three types of persons: first, second, and third. These pronouns can either be singular or plural.^[21]

Verbs

The suffix -ro is an imperative marker, which conveys a command or request to another person.^[22]

The suffix -le is a negative imperative (prohibitive) marker, which conveys a command or request to not do an action to another person.^[22]

The suffix -ŋa is a negative indicative marker, which negates a statement or question.^[23]