In most circumstances, vowels in any given word must either be all advanced or all retracted in their tongue root position.
Turkana is a verb-initial language with both verb–subject–object (VSO) and verb–object–subject (VOS) as basic, unmarked word orders.
Subjects of intransitive and transitive verbs receive the same case marking.
Neither object can be promoted to be the subject of a basic sentence, so that Turkana has no real passive construction.
Turkana features six cases: a nominative, an absolute, a genitive, an instrumental, a locative, and a vocative.
[3] This makes it typologically unusual as one of the only verb-initial languages attested to have more than two or three cases.