Luganda

The Ganda language or Luganda (/luːˈɡændə/, Oluganda, ) is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda, spoken by more than six million Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda, including the capital Kampala of Uganda. It belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger–Congo language family. Typologically, it is a highly-agglutinating language with subject–verb–object, word order and nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment. The Ganda language or Luganda (/luːˈɡændə/, Oluganda, ) is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda, spoken by more than six million Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda, including the capital Kampala of Uganda. It belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger–Congo language family. Typologically, it is a highly-agglutinating language with subject–verb–object, word order and nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment. With about six million first-language-speakers in the Buganda region and a million others fluent elsewhere, it is the most widely-spoken Ugandan language. As a second language, it follows English and precedes Swahili. Luganda is used in some primary schools in Buganda as pupils begin to learn English, the primary official language of Uganda. Until the 1960s, Luganda was also the official language of instruction in primary schools in Eastern Uganda. 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' (third person singular present tense Class VI ka- of -baka 'to catch'). 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. 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. The table below gives the consonant set of Luganda, grouping voiceless and voiced consonants together in a cell where appropriate, in that order.