Editing Marked nominative alignment (section)

==Distribution==

Marked nominative languages are relatively rare. They are well-documented in only two regions of the world: in northern Africa, where they occur in many languages of the [[Cushitic languages|Cushitic]], [[Omotic languages|Omotic]] and [[Berber languages|Berber]] branches of the [[Afroasiatic languages|Afroasiatic]] family, as well as in the [[Surmic languages|Surmic]] and [[Nilotic languages]] of the [[Eastern Sudanic languages|Eastern Sudanic]] family;<ref>{{cite book |last=König |first=Christa |year=2008 |title=Case in Africa |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press}}</ref> and in the southwestern United States and adjacent parts of Mexico, where they are characteristic of the [[Yuman languages|Yuman]] family. Other languages interpreted by some authors as having a marked nominative system include [[Igbo language|Igbo]], [[Aymara language|Aymara]] and [[Wappo language|Wappo]]. It is also proposed that marked-nominative alignment can be reconstructed for the ancestor of the [[Afroasiatic languages]], viz. [[Proto-Afroasiatic language|Proto-Afroasiatic]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Satzinger |first=Helmut |year=2018 |chapter=Did Proto-Afroasiatic have Marked Nominative or Nominative-Accusative Alignment? |title=Afroasiatic: Data and perspectives |editor-last=Tosco |editor-first=Mauro |location=Amsterdam |publisher=John Benjamins |pages=11–22 |isbn=9789027264572 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=s7VGDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA11}} Open-access [https://homepage.univie.ac.at/helmut.satzinger/Texte/MarkedNominative.pdf preprint version] available.</ref>

In Yuman and many of the Cushitic languages, however, the nominative is not always marked for reasons that are not known. There may, therefore, be not a strict case system but a reflection of discourse patterns or other non-[[semantics|semantic]] parameters. However, the Yuman language [[Havasupai language|Havasupai]] is reported to have a purely syntactic case system, with a suffix ''-č'' marking all subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs but not of the copula; in the Nilotic language [[Datooga language|Datooga]], the system is also reported to be purely syntactic.

As in many Nilotic languages, Datooga case is marked by tone. The absolutive case has the unpredictable tone of the citation form of the noun, but the nominative is marked by a characteristic tone that obliterates the lexical tone. The tone is high for words of three syllables or less; for words with four or more syllables, the ends of the word have high tone, with a low tone in the middle of the word.

In most African languages with a marked nominative, the nominative is used for subjects following the verb, the absolutive with the copula, with subjects in focus position before the verb, and in all other situations.

[[Okinawan language|Okinawan]], a [[Japonic language]], is generally a marked nominative language where nominative subjects are marked with the case particles ''ga'' or ''nu'' depending on their level of [[animacy]]. Unmarked nouns are by default in the accusative case. However, some verbs of existence and emergence may also have optionally unmarked nominative subjects.<ref>{{cite book|title=The Cambridge Handbook of Japanese Linguistics|first=Michinori|last=Shimoji|year=2018|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=9781316884461|series=Cambridge Handbooks of Linguistics|editor-last=Hasegawa|editor-first=Yoko|doi=10.1017/9781316884461|chapter=Okinawan|pages=104–107}}</ref>