A Collection of Interesting Languages of the World 57: Lip Plates and Vanishing Words—The Mursi Language, the Last Secret Language of Ethiopia
1. Introduction: What is the language spoken by the people with "lip plates"?
The Mursi people are well known as one of the ethnic groups with the most shocking visuals in the world. The custom of the "lip plate," where women cut their lower lips to insert clay plates, has been featured many times in magazines and documentaries.
However, behind that "visual shock," how many people have paid attention to the language itself they speak?
Mursi is a surprisingly complex and beautiful language that linguists call "one of the most endangered languages in Africa." And that language is now quietly disappearing.
2. Location and People: About 7,400 people living in the secret region along the Omo River
The Mursi language is spoken in the region extending to the east of the lower Omo River basin in southwestern Ethiopia. It is about 800 km south of the capital, Addis Ababa. About 7,400 Mursi people live in this land, which has no paved roads and has had almost no contact with the outside world.
They lead a semi-pastoral, semi-agricultural life and have their own chieftaincy and clan system. They farm along the river during the rainy season and practice transhumance with their cattle during the dry season. Cattle are not just property; they are at the center of their culture, to the extent that the color and pattern of a cow's coat can become a person's name.
🌍 The Mursi have their own clan and age-set system, and the council of elders is responsible for traditional decision-making. In recent years, as contact with outside tourists has increased, changes have begun to occur in their social structure as well.
3. The "Family Tree" of the language: A mysterious large family called the Nilo-Saharan language family
Tracing the "lineage" of the Mursi language leads one into the deep forest of African linguistics.
Mursi belongs to the Nilo-Saharan language family. This is one of the major language families distributed across the African continent, and it is a completely different lineage from Arabic, Swahili, and others. Within this, Mursi is positioned in the branch of "East Sudanic > Surmic > Southeast Surmic."
Related languages in the same group include Suri, Me'en, and Kwegu. However, these languages also have few speakers and are all poorly documented.
📖 A comprehensive grammar book of the Mursi language was first published in 2021. It is based on a doctoral dissertation written by linguist Firew Girma Wolde based on fieldwork conducted from 2016 to 2020.
4. Grammatical features: The "number" of nouns is too complex
The first thing that surprises linguists about Mursi grammar is the complexity of how noun numbers are expressed.
In Japanese, you can just add "tachi" to the same stem for both "book" and "books." In English, you add an -s to make "book → books." However, in Mursi, the way plurals are formed varies completely depending on the type of noun.
Nouns are broadly divided into four groups based on how they express number.
"Replacement type": The stem changes between singular and plural (like the alternation in English goose/geese)
"Plural marking type": A suffix is added to form the plural
"Singularization type": The plural is the base form, and a suffix is added to create the singular (a reversal of conventional thinking!).
"Suppletive type": Completely different words are used for singular and plural.
Furthermore, the word for "river" has three forms.
A single noun can have this many forms.
5. Tone and Word Order: Pitch Changes the Meaning of Sentences
Mursi is a tonal language. However, compared to the 9 tones of Cantonese or the 6 tones of Vietnamese, Mursi's tone system seems simple—only two types: High (H) and Low (L).
Yet, these two tones play a surprisingly important role at both the vocabulary and grammatical levels. Even with the same combination of consonants and vowels, a different tone changes the meaning. Furthermore, distinctions such as noun number, as well as verb person, aspect, and mood, are all marked by changes in tone.
Word order is also interesting.
The basic word order of Mursi is AVO (Subject + Verb + Object), but this applies to ordinary sentences.
In negative sentences, the word order changes to AOV (Subject + Object + Verb), with the verb placed at the end.
Also, in patterns where the subject follows the verb (VS / OVA), a nominative case marker appears on that subject.
🎵 Tone also exhibits a rare phenomenon called "polarity." In certain morphological contexts, an original high tone automatically changes to low, and a low tone changes to high, resulting in a "tonal inversion."
6. No Written Language: A Script is Just Now Being Born
For a long time, Mursi had no writing system. It is a language that has been passed down solely through oral tradition.
However, this situation is now changing. Two types of orthography (rules for writing) are beginning to emerge: one based on the Amharic script (widely used in Ethiopia), and one based on the Latin alphabet. The debate over which to adopt is still ongoing within the community.
This "moment of beginning to have a script" is a historical turning point similar to 1949, when the N'Ko script was created. However, there is a difference. The N'Ko script was created by a single person, whereas the Mursi orthography is emerging from discussions within the entire community.
✍️ Linguist Fillew Wolk collected over 40 hours of audio recordings during field research from 2016 to 2019. Over 1,000 pages of transcriptions and annotations remain as the first "record" of the Mursi language.
7. A Language Changing Through Contact with the Outside World: Tourists, Government, and the Wave of Modernization
Many tourists visit Mursi villages every year to photograph the lip plates. While that tourism revenue has brought cash to the community, it has simultaneously drastically changed their traditional way of life.
The impact on the language is even more profound. As Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, is used in all aspects of education, administration, and trade, the opportunities to speak Mursi are decreasing year by year. The younger generation is more accustomed to Amharic, and many of the traditional Mursi stories, songs, and naming customs have already fallen out of use.
"If things continue this way, not only will the language be lost, but all the knowledge embedded within it will vanish as well"—local elders and young linguists are growing increasingly alarmed by this prospect.
8. Summary: Behind the Visual Shock, a Language Is Fading Away
Contrary to its shocking appearance, the Mursi language possesses a surprisingly sophisticated linguistic system. Its four types of noun number marking, polarity reversal of tones, and the interplay between word order and case marking are all complexities that linguists have spent years unraveling.
And a language with such complexity is now on the verge of disappearing.
The publication of the first comprehensive grammar book in 2021 is a ray of hope. However, that alone is not enough to keep a language alive. A language only lives as long as there are people who speak it.
The next time you see a photograph of the Mursi people, I hope you will think not of their lip plates, but of the words that come from their mouths.Think of a language that has four ways to express number, reverses its tones, and is only now beginning to be written down.
What did you think?
This blog introduces other interesting languages from around the world, so please take a look.