2191: Languages without Plural Dec 14, 2020

While languages have multiple different types of pluralization in their morphology, some have none. Indeed, across the Austronesian languages there is a great deal of diversity in this matter, with Sursurunga having 5 and Indonesian having ostensibly 0. This is not to say languages like this, especially common around East Asia and the Pacific, have no way of expressing plural obviously, but that it will either be done through a certain amount of context as with the English 'sheep-sheep', with specific determiners as with the Maori

te ngeru (the cat)

ngā ngeru (the cats)

where the nouns stay the same, but the determiners are different. In other cases, as in Indonesian, there will be some of these markers but if not, there will be reduplication,

Kucing (cat)

Kucing-kucing (cats). This is certainly a syntactic way to express the plural, but lacks a specific morpheme.