Mursi (also Dama, Merdu, Meritu, Murzi, Murzu) is a Southeast Surmic language spoken by the Mursi people who live in the South Omo Zone on the eastern side of the lower Omo valley in southwest Ethiopia. The language is similar to Suri, another Southeast Surmic language spoken to the west of the Mursi language area. It is spoken by approximately 7,400 people.

Classification

Mursi is classified as belonging to the Southeast Surmic languages, to which the following other languages also belong: Suri, Me'en and Kwegu. As such, Mursi is also part of the superordinate Eastern Sudanic family of the Nilo-Saharan languages.

Phonology

Phoneme inventory

The vowel and consonant inventory of Mursi is similar to those of other Southeast Surmic languages, except for the lack of ejectives, the labial fricative // and the voiceless stop //.

Tone

Both Mütze and Firew agree that there are only two underlying tone levels in Mursi, as opposed to larger inventories proposed by Turton and Bender and Moges.

Grammar

The Mursi grammar makes use of the following parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, adpositions, question words, quantifiers, connectors, discourse particles, interjections, ideophones, and expressives.

Nouns

Nouns can be inflected for number and case. The number marking system is very complex, using suffixation, suppletion or tone to either mark plurals from singular bases, or singulatives from plural bases. Mursi preverbal subjects and all objects are unmarked, whereas postverbal subjects are marked by a nominative case. Further cases are the oblique case and the genitive case. Modified nouns receive a special morphological marking called construct form by Mütze.