Abstract:

No two languages are the same all over the world. Every language has what makes it different from another. This paper compares two languages – English and Gokana. The latter is a Niger-Congo language while the former is an Indo-European language. The aim was to specifically investigate how pluralization of nouns are formed in both languages. It was observed that while English uses suffixes to mark plurality, Gokana uses prefixes (which involve qualifiers, numerals, reduplication, quantifiers and determiners). Similarly, it was also revealed that while English uses regular and irregular form to mark plurality, Gokana employs different strategies (that cannot be considered regular or irregular) to mark plurality. Again, while pluralization of foreign nouns varies in English, pluralization of foreign nouns in Gokana cannot be accounted for since there is no evidence of foreign nouns in Gokana. The paper considers the implication of the study for the English language teaching and learning especially in a second language setting.