Revisiting the central question of Lango and Kumam in Lwo classification

Are the Lango and Kumam Lwo speakers or not? The purpose of this chapter is to assess the extent to which onomastics has led to the differentiation of the Lwo group into sub-languages thereby fracturing the language and creating multiplicity of languages in the cluster. Like the unstable place of Mande in the Niger-Congo cluster , Lango or Leblango and Kumam have faced consistently questionable positions in the Lwo language family. Most of the questions about the Kumam and Lango have not appeared on serious linguistic treatises except on sociological, anthropological and historical texts such as Okot p’Bitek’s ‘Religions of the central Luo’; Ogot’s ‘History of the Southern Luo’ and Uzoigwe’s ‘The beginnings of Lango society’. For this matter, Diagne is right when he contends that ‘the study of relationships between languages is at crossroads between linguistics and history.’ In this chapter I ask one central question: Is Kumam and Lango Luo or eastern Nilotic languages? What is the linguistic evidence? Based on a survey of basic vocabulary, the overall finding in the chapter is that the relationship of Lango and Kumam is overwhelmingly more skewed toward the southern Lwo group than to the Iteso-Ng’akarimojong cluster (eastern Nilotics).