Luganda
Ganda or Luganda is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda and is spoken by more than 5.56 million Ugandans Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda, including the country's capital, Kampala. Typologically, it is an agglutinative, tonal language with subject–verb–object word order and nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment.
With at least 5.6 million first-language speakers in the Buganda region and 5.4 million second language speakers fluent elsewhere in different regions especially in major urban areas like Mbale, Tororo, Jinja, Gulu, Mbarara, Hoima, Kasese etc. Luganda is Uganda's de facto language of national identity as it is the most widely spoken Ugandan language used mostly in trade in urban areas. The language is also the most-spoken unofficial language in Rwanda's capital Kigali. As a second language, it follows English and precedes Swahili in Uganda.
Lusoga, the language spoken in Busoga to the east of Buganda, is very closely related to Luganda. The two languages are almost mutually intelligible, and have an estimated lexical similarity of between 82% and 86%.
History
Luganda, a Bantu language, shares its roots with other Bantu languages spoken in the African Great Lakes region. Its specific origins remain a subject of scholarly debate, but it's generally accepted that it evolved from Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language of all Bantu languages.During the 18th -19th century, due to interaction with foreign communities, Luganda borrowed a number of loan words from the incoming peoples, mostly for things that were inexistent in the land, such as a number of words from Arabic like chai from Arabic shay, ddiini, ssala, and from English, for example ssaati or emotoka.
Phonology
A notable feature of Luganda phonology is its geminate consonants and distinctions between long and short vowels. Speakers generally consider consonantal gemination and vowel lengthening to be two manifestations of the same effect, which they call simply "doubling" or "stressing".Luganda is also a tonal language; the change in the pitch of a syllable can change the meaning of a word. For example, the word kabaka means 'king' if all three syllables are given the same pitch. If the first syllable is high then the meaning changes to 'the little one catches'. This feature makes Luganda a difficult language for speakers of non-tonal languages to learn. A non-native speaker has to learn the variations of pitch by prolonged listening.
Unlike some other Bantu languages, there is no tendency in Luganda for penultimate vowels to become long; in fact they are very frequently short, as in the city name Kampala Kámpalâ, pronounced, in which the second vowel is short in Luganda.
Vowels
All five vowels have two forms: long and short. The distinction is phonemic but can occur only in certain positions. After two consonants, the latter being a semivowel, all vowels are long. The quality of a vowel is not affected by its length.Long vowels in Luganda are very long, more than twice the length of a short vowel. A vowel before a prenasalised consonant, as in Bugáńda 'Buganda' is also lengthened, although it is not as long as a long vowel; laboratory measurements show that the vowel + nasal takes the same length of time to say as a long vowel. Before a geminate, all vowels are short. A segment such as tugg, where a short vowel is followed by a geminate consonant, is very slightly shorter than tuuk or tung.
Consonants
The table below gives the consonant set of Luganda, grouping voiceless and voiced consonants together in a cell where appropriate, in that order.| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |
| Plosive | ||||
| Fricative | ||||
| Nasal | ||||
| Approximant | ~ | |||
| Trill | ~ |
Apart from, all these consonants can be geminated, even at the start of a word: bbiri 'two', kitto 'cold'. The approximants and are geminated as and : eggwanga 'country'; jjenje 'cricket'—from the roots -wanga and -yenje respectively, with the singular noun prefix e- that doubles the following consonant.
Historically, geminated consonants appear to have arisen when a very close between two consonants dropped out; for example -dduka from *-jiduka 'run'.
Apart from, and, all consonants can also be prenasalised. This consonant will be,, or according to the place of articulation of the consonant which follows, and belongs to the same syllable as that consonant.
The liquid becomes when geminated or prenasalised. For example, ndaba 'I see' ; eddagala 'leaf'.
A consonant cannot be both geminated and prenasalised. When morphological processes require this, the gemination is dropped and the syllable is inserted, which can then be prenasalised. For example, when the prefix en- is added to the adjective -ddugavu 'black' the result is enzirugavu.
The nasals,, and can be syllabic at the start of a word: nkima 'monkey', mpa 'I give', nnyinyonnyola or 'I explain'. Note that this last example can be analysed in two ways, reflecting the fact that there is no distinction between prenasalisation and gemination when applied to nasal stops.
Tone
Luganda is a tonal language, with three tones: high, low and falling. There are, however, no syllables in Luganda with rising tone, since these automatically become.There are various types of tones: lexical tones, which are always present in a word, e.g. ekibúga 'city'; phrasal tones, which are automatically added to a word in certain contexts, but which are absent in other contexts ; plateaux tones, where the pitch remains high between two lexical tones, e.g. kírí mú Úgáńda 'it is in Uganda'; grammatical tones, which are associated with certain tenses or uses of the verb; boundary tones, which affect the last syllable of a word or phrase and can indicate such things as interrogation.
According to one analysis, tones are carried on morae. In Luganda, a short vowel has one mora and a long vowel has two morae. A geminate or prenasalised consonant has one mora. A consonant + semivowel also has one mora. A vowel followed by a prenasalised consonant has two morae including the one belonging to the prenasalised consonant. The initial vowel of words like ekitabo 'book' is considered to have one mora, even though such vowels are often pronounced long. No syllable can have more than two morae.
Falling tones can be heard in syllables which have two morae, e.g. those with a long vowel, those with a short vowel followed by a geminate consonant, those with a vowel followed by a prenasalised consonant, and those following a consonant plus semivowel. They can also be heard on final vowels, e.g. ensî 'country'.
Words in Luganda commonly belong to one of three patterns : without lexical tone, e.g. ekitabo 'book'; with one high lexical tone, e.g. ekibúga 'city'; with two high lexical tones, e.g. Kámpalá which link together to make HHH, i.e. or . At the end of a sentence, a final lexical tone becomes a falling tone, i.e. , but in other contexts, e.g. when the word is used as the subject of a sentence, it remains high: Kámpálá kibúga 'Kampala is a city'.
Although words like ekitabo are theoretically toneless, they are generally subject to a tone-raising rule whereby all but the first mora automatically acquire a high tone. Thus ekitabo 'book' is usually pronounced and ssomero 'school' is pronounced . These tones automatically added to toneless words are called 'phrasal tones'. The tone-raising rule also applies to the toneless syllables at the end of words like eddwâliro 'hospital' and túgenda 'we are going', provided that there is at least one low-toned mora after the lexical tone. When this happens, the high tones which follow the low tone are slightly lower than the one which precedes it.
However, there are certain contexts, such as when a toneless word is used as the subject of a sentence or before a numeral, when this tone-raising rule does not apply: Masindi kibúga 'Masindi is a city'; ebitabo kkúmi 'ten books'.
In a sentence, the lexical tones tend to fall gradually in a series of steps from high to low. For example, in the sentence kye kibúga ekikúlu mu Ugáńda 'it is the chief city in Uganda', the lexical high tones of the syllables bú, kú and gá stand out and gradually descend in pitch, the toneless syllables in between being lower. This phenomenon is called 'downdrift'.
However, there are certain types of phrase, notably those in the form 'noun + of + noun', or 'verb + location', where downdrift does not occur, and instead all the syllables in between the two lexical high tones link together into a 'tonal plateau', in which all the vowels have tones of equal height, for example mu maséréngétá gá Úgáńda 'in the south of Uganda' or kírí mú Úgáńda 'it is in Uganda'. Plateauing also occurs within a word, as in Kámpálâ.
A plateau cannot be formed between a lexical tone and a following phrasal tone; so in the sentence kíri mu Bunyóró 'it is in Bunyoro' there is downdrift, since the tones of Bunyóró are phrasal. But a phrasal tone can and frequently does form a plateau with a following lexical tone or phrasal tone. So in abántú mú Úgáńda 'people in Uganda', there is a plateau from the phrasal tone of abántú to the lexical tone of Ugáńda, and in túgendá mú lúgúúdó 'we are going into the street', there is a plateau from the phrasal tone of túgendá to the phrasal tone of lugúúdó. Again there are certain exceptions; for example, there is no plateau before the words ono 'this' or bonnâ 'all': muntú onó 'this person', abántú bonnâ 'all the people'.
Prefixes sometimes change the tones in a word. For example, Bagáńda 'they are Baganda' has LHHL, but adding the initial vowel a- gives Abagândá 'Baganda people' with a falling tone on ga and phrasal tone on the final syllable.
Different verb tenses have different tonal patterns. The tones of verbs are made more complicated by the fact that some verbs have a high lexical tone on the first syllable of the root, while others do not, and also by the fact that the sequence HH generally becomes HL by a rule called Meeussen's rule. Thus asóma means 'he reads', but when the toneless prefix a- 'he/she' is replaced by the high-toned prefix bá- 'they', instead of básóma it becomes básomá 'they read'. The tones of verbs in relative clauses and in negative sentences differ from those in ordinary positive sentences and the addition of an object-marker such as mu 'him' adds further complications.
In addition to lexical tones, phrasal tones, and the tonal patterns of tenses, there are also intonational tones in Luganda, for example, tones of questions. One rather unexpected phenomenon for English speakers is that if a yes–no question ends in a toneless word, instead of a rise, there is a sharp drop in pitch, e.g. lúnó lúgúúdò? 'is this a road?'.