Morphological Analysis of Noun Classes in Edo Language: A Study of Benin City Speakers

This study presents a morphological analysis of noun classes in the Edo language as spoken by residents of Benin City, Edo State, South South Nigeria. The Edo language, belonging to the Edoid branch of the Niger-Congo family, possesses a complex noun class system that has received limited systematic documentation in recent scholarship, particularly in view of ongoing language shift pressures. The study adopts a descriptive linguistic methodology informed by the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology. Data were elicited from 60 native speakers of Edo selected through purposive sampling from three age cohorts in Benin City. Elicitation tasks included word lists, minimal pair identification, and naturalistic speech samples. The analysis maps the noun class prefixes, their agreement patterns with verbs and adjectives, and evidence of class collapse among younger speakers. Findings reveal a stable core of five primary noun classes in adult speech, with evidence of simplification and occasional class merger in the speech of participants under 30 years of age. The study argues that class merger among younger speakers reflects the combined influence of English contact and reduced intergenerational transmission of Edo morphological patterns. The research contributes to the documentation and preservation of Edo morphological structures and recommends urgent corpus development initiatives for the language. Keywords: morphological analysis, noun classes, Edo language, Benin City, language documentation.