#linguistic geography

(near) Open/low front unrounded vowel

This is the vowel used in English “sad”.  It exists as an allophone of other vowels in Turkish, Russian, Dutch, Slovak, Swedish and French (as a nasal vowel). 

Phonemically, it exists in English, all Arabic languages/dialects, all Berber languages, Somali, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Danish, Kurdish, Azeri, Persian, Qazaq, Uzbek, Turkmen, Uyghur, Bashkir, Orya, Sinhalese, and in some dialects of Portuguese, Andalusian Spanish, Greek, Romanian. 

Plural Marking typology

How languages mark the plural number on nouns. 

Many Bantu languages use a prefix system (also with gender).

Most Indo-European languages have suffixes, although the Germanic languages, and, to a lesser extent French, have a mixed strategy that involves apophony/umlaut, and in the case of French, many irregular plurals, that totaly change the pronounciation of the word. 

Arabic, Berber, Hebrew, some Nilo-Saharan languages have this mixed strategy with vowel changes in the middle of the words, and suffixes. 

Dinka and Nuer (South Sudan) have only a stem change (apophony). 

A few African languages just change the tone of the word. French, Tibetan, Burmese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Philippines’ languages and many Polynesian languages, and the Mande languages West Africa, use a particle before the noun, usually. In French this is the definite article la/le vs. les, because the final -s of nouns is not pronounced, so the plural is only noun in the spoken language from this particle. 

Indonesian and Malay have full reduplication (orang - person; orang-orang - people). 

Many East Asian languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai) don’t mark plural at all.