| Also Known As: Luganda
Description:
Luganda, sometimes known as Ganda, is a major language of Uganda, spoken by over ten million people mainly in Southern Uganda which includes the Ugandan capital Kampala. It belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Typologically, it is an 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 about four million others with a working knowledge, it is the most widely spoken Ugandan language, and as second language in Uganda is next to English. The language is used in some primary schools in Buganda as pupils begin to learn English, the 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..... full article at Wikipedia |
