Number Category in Language Varieties of Some Cities in Kerman Province: A Typological Study

At first glance, “number” is considered as a very simple grammatical category. However, in fact, it is a complex matter in languages and it causes varieties in world languages. The present study aims at examining the plurality and number category in language varieties of some cities in Kerman province based on typological approach. The survey’s corpus is extracted from Iran Linguistic Atlas’s database (ILA) a project compiling in Research Center of Cultural Heritage and Tourism. The research results show that, the value of number category in the studied language varieties is just singular and plural. The singular nouns are encoded without marker and the plural nouns are marked. The plural markers attach to singular nouns in suffix form, therefore the strategy for plurality in the studied language varieties is morphology, which is the most common one in the world languages. The data analysis indicates that syntactic strategy is used for encoding the number category along with morphological one.