Kumam is not a Luo (also spelled LWO) dialect of Uganda although past linguists have wrongly grouped it under

Luo languages The dozen Luo, Lwo or Lwoian languages are spoken by the Luo peoples in an area ranging from southern Sudan to western Ethiopia to southern Kenya, with Dholuo extending into northern Tanzania and Alur into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. ...

. It is rather an Ateker language mixed with Luo vocabularies spoken by the

Kumam people The Kumam are a Nilo-Hamitic ethnic group of about 349,000 living mainly in the western areas of Teso sub-region and the south-east of Lango sub-region. The Kumam are an ethnic group of people found in Kaberamaido district, district in Eastern Ug ...

Uganda }), is a landlocked country in East Africa East Africa, Eastern Africa, or East of Africa, is the eastern subregion of the African continent. In the United Nations Statistics Division scheme of geographic regions, 10-11-(16*) territor ...

. It is estimated that

Kumam The Kumam are a Nilo-Hamitic ethnic group of about 349,000 living mainly in the western areas of Teso sub-region and the south-east of Lango sub-region. The Kumam are an ethnic group of people found in Kaberamaido district, district in Eastern Ug ...

dialect has 82 percent lexical similarity with Acholi dialect, 81 percent with Langi dialect and 20 percent with

Teso language Teso (natively ''Ateso'') is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken by the Iteso people of Uganda and Kenya and some speakers are in South Sudan. It is part of the Teso–Turkana language cluster. According to the 2002 Uganda population and housing ...

. However, these are often counted as separate languages despite common ethnic origins due to linguistic shift occasioned by geographical movement. Kumam is widely spoken in the

Ugandan }), is a landlocked country in East Africa. The country is bordered to the east by Kenya, to the north by South Sudan, to the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the south-west by Rwanda, and to the south by Tanzania. The southe ...

districts of

Kaberamaido Kaberamaido is a town in Eastern Uganda. It is the main municipal, administrative and commercial center of Kaberamaido District and is the location of the headquarters for the district. Location Kaberamaido is located approximately by road, nor ...

kalaki] orotiand

Dokolo Dokolo is a town in the Northern Region of Uganda. It is the main municipal, administrative, and commercial centre of Dokolo District. Location Dokolo is located approximately , by road, southeast of Lira, the largest city in the sub-region. Thi ...

The alphabet

There are twenty two letters in the

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...

F,H,Q,V,H,X and Z are not used and η and NY are added. F,H,Q,V,H,X,Z only appear in loan words. The pronunciation guides that follow are for practice only; the correct sounds can only be learned by practice from a teacher or an audio media. There are five vowels in

: A, E, I, O, and U. These five letters, however, represent more than five sounds, for the letters E, I, O and U have two values each; a "close" value and an "open" value.

Basic lexicon

Hello – yoga
How are you? –Itiye benyo (singular), Itiyenu benyo (plural)
Fine, and you? – Atiye ber, arai bon yin?
Fine – Atiye ber or just ber
What is your name? – Nying in en Ngai?
My name is ... – Nying ango en ...
Name --- Nying
Nice to see you. --- Apwoyo Neno in (also: Apwoyo Neno wun)
See you again --- Oneno bobo
Book – Itabo
Because – Pi Ento The first sentence in the bible can be translated as ''I ya gege, Rubanga ocweo wi polo kede piny'' ("In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth" ).

References

Luo languages {{ns-lang-stub