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Uganda's indigenous Bantu, Nilotic and Central Sudanic languages and their speaker numbers (The languages marked "*" are often conflated towards Luo; similarly, those marked "**" have been clustered towards Runyakitara to facilitate their teaching, cf. Bernsten 1998.)
Source publication
Ugandan English is a variety that has scarcely been noticed in past research. This timely volume brings together African and European scholars in a first-ever collection of articles that offer comprehensive discussions of the historical and present-day sociolinguistics of English in Uganda and fine-grained analyses of the structural characteristics...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... these, five are institutional, 26 are developing, six are vigorous, two are in trouble, and two are dying. Out of the 41 languages, 39 are indigenous (for details on these, see Section 3.2, particularly Table 1) while two, English and Ugandan Sign language, are foreign. 2 The indigenous languages belong to four major language groups, Bantu, Central Sudanic, Nilotic and Kuliak, the first three being "as different as say English, Chinese, and Arabic; and even the Eastern and Western Nilotic groups differ from each other as much as English and French" (Ladefoged et al. 1972: 17). ...Context 2
... the figure today is probably considerably higher than the 2.5 million given by Crystal (2003: 65) and used in Lewis et al. (2015a). 4 Whereas there are very few native speakers of Kiswahili in Uganda as per the 2002 population census of Uganda (2,333 as indicated in Table 1 below), Lewis et al. (2015a) report that "up to 80% of rural communities, especially those living in greater proximity to neighbouring countries, have some knowledge of Kiswahili as one of the additional languages in their linguistic repertoires". ...Context 3
... is evident from the map, the Bantu languages are spoken in the South as well as in the West of the country, while the Nilotic languages are spoken in the North. It is these two language 3. 2 The social space of Uganda's languages Table 1 provides an overview of the individual Bantu, Nilotic and Central Sudanic languages spoken in Uganda, together with the figures for their numbers of speakers as given by Lewis et al. (2015a), largely based on data available from the 2002 census. 6 Over the last thirteen years, however, Uganda's population has grown from the 24,227,297 million in 2002to 34,856,813 in 2014(Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2015, and the figures in Table 1 certainly do not accurately reflect the present-day situation. ...Context 4
... is these two language 3. 2 The social space of Uganda's languages Table 1 provides an overview of the individual Bantu, Nilotic and Central Sudanic languages spoken in Uganda, together with the figures for their numbers of speakers as given by Lewis et al. (2015a), largely based on data available from the 2002 census. 6 Over the last thirteen years, however, Uganda's population has grown from the 24,227,297 million in 2002to 34,856,813 in 2014(Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2015, and the figures in Table 1 certainly do not accurately reflect the present-day situation. Nevertheless, they allow for an understanding of the language situation in terms of individual languages clearly occupying more space in Uganda's linguistic ecology than others, in terms of their speaker numbers. ...Context 5
... they allow for an understanding of the language situation in terms of individual languages clearly occupying more space in Uganda's linguistic ecology than others, in terms of their speaker numbers. As is immediately visible from Table 1, the Bantu languages constitute by far the largest group in Uganda, accounting for 64.8% of the total population, while the share of the Nilotic languages amounts to 28.2% and that of the Central Sudanic languages to 6.8%. Besides the languages listed in Table 1, Nubi, an Arabic-based Creole spoken by the dispersed Nubians, who originally migrated from Sudan but now live scattered throughout the country, is spoken by 26,100 individuals, and the Kuliak languages Ik, Nyang'i and Soo by some 7,500, 20 and 50 respectively. ...Context 6
... is immediately visible from Table 1, the Bantu languages constitute by far the largest group in Uganda, accounting for 64.8% of the total population, while the share of the Nilotic languages amounts to 28.2% and that of the Central Sudanic languages to 6.8%. Besides the languages listed in Table 1, Nubi, an Arabic-based Creole spoken by the dispersed Nubians, who originally migrated from Sudan but now live scattered throughout the country, is spoken by 26,100 individuals, and the Kuliak languages Ik, Nyang'i and Soo by some 7,500, 20 and 50 respectively. The Kuliak languages are clearly minority languages in the country, as is Nubi. ...Context 7
... Kuliak languages are clearly minority languages in the country, as is Nubi. A further significant fact emerging from Table 1 is the considerably low figure for first language (L1) speakers of Kiswahili, i.e. 2,333. Furthermore, Uganda's Asian community speak various immigrant languages, most notably Gujarati, and Punjabi (cf. ...Context 8
... 2 summarises how Lewis et al. (2015a) assess the status of Uganda's languages. Read in combination with Table 1 above, Table 2 suggests that the number of speakers is clearly not the only factor determining whether a particular language is endangered or not. As Lewis & Simons (2010) explain, intergenerational transmission, institutional recognition and the existence of a writing system are additional crucial factors. ...Context 9
... survey reveals that of those languages which have the largest numbers of L1 speakers (cf. Table 1 in Section 2.1) the ones that are used as L2s by our informants are English, Kiswahili and Luganda, with Runyankore completing the picture in the Western and, to a lower extent, Central Regions. There is a slight preference for Kiswahili over Luganda in the Western and Northern Regions, especially as regards the languages' daily and regular use. ...Similar publications
Although not studied by the generative approach (Shlonsky 2017), the embedded Wh- in situ clause nevertheless belongs to the French language spoken in a large amount of areas, and, we believe, to “français tout court” (Blanche-Benveniste & Jeanjean 1987): until now, it has mainly been studied in Quebec (Lefebvre & Maisonneuve 1982; Blondeau & Ledeg...
Subject dislocation (SD) is common across languages. In French, it is a vernacular norm. In English, it is comparatively rare. This article examines English SD in a unique contrastive situation in Ontario, Canada: two communities where SD is a community norm, one where individuals speak both English and French (Kapuskasing), and the other where the...
Citations
... As Uganda is a heterogeneous nation with different cultural units, there are many languages in the country. The country is said to have 65 indigenous ethnic groups and 41 active languages (Namyalo et al., 2016). Furthermore, it is noted that some of these languages are similar in syntax and lexical expressions especially those that fall under related ethnic groups. ...
... Furthermore, it is noted that some of these languages are similar in syntax and lexical expressions especially those that fall under related ethnic groups. The notable ethnic groups in Uganda are the Bantu speakers, who are concentrated around the central, southern and the western regions and speak languages such as Luganda, Runyankole and Rutooro (Namyalo et al., 2016). On the other hand, the Nilotic group, which includes the Acholi and the Lango, lives in the north, whereas the Karamojong and the Iteso are in the northeast; one of the smallest language families is the Central Sudanic group, which occupies the northwest part of the country (Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2016). ...
... Note that the first two languages are Nilotic languages, while the last two are Bantu languages. The two language subphyla are the major language sub-families out of the four that exist in Uganda (Namyalo et al., 2016). Tiffen (1974: 235) reports that, compared to RP, stress in Nigerian English moves away from the first syllable onto the syllable that follows in words such as in 'teresting, u'sually, in'terval, nor'mally, among other stress shift patterns (see also Atechi, 2004: 41). ...
The study delineates divergences that set apart the Ugandan accent from RP with respect to primary lexical stress placement, as well as divergences that evince variability among Ugandans. For example, differences from RP were (almost) homogenously observed in the words effect, cassava, agreement , arrest, alarm , with stress placed on the first syllable of all these nouns, while inter-speaker variability was substantially observed in words such as bursar, further, with some speakers placing stress on both syllables of the words, while others had the stress on the first syllable only. Analogy and underlying substrate influence account for the divergences, with substrate influence considered along the lines of what Wells (1982) refers to as ‘lexical distribution.
... Uganda has not had an official language survey since 1971, and most scholars and reports have provided varying statistics about languages in Uganda. It is reported that there are 43 living indigenous languages [1] down from 63 varieties identified in 1972 [2]. ...
... English is common among the elites, and is the language of instruction in schools and offices, serving as a unifying language in the country. However, Swahili remains largely expressed in the border districts and is not a de-facto language in the parliament or courts of law in Uganda [1]. Instead, Luganda is steadily positioning itself as an undeclared national language in Uganda with the last published report of 1998 showing a total of 4,130,000 speakers [4] out of a population of 22 million people. ...
Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved great successes with large datasets, so NMT is more premised on high-resource languages. This continuously underpins the low resource languages such as Luganda due to the lack of high-quality parallel corpora, so even 'Google translate' does not serve Luganda at the time of this writing. In this paper, we build a parallel corpus with 41,070 pairwise sentences for Luganda and English which is based on three different open-sourced corpora. Then, we train NMT models with hyper-parameter search on the dataset. Experiments gave us a BLEU score of 21.28 from Luganda to English and 17.47 from English to Luganda. Some translation examples show high quality of the translation. We believe that our model is the first Luganda-English NMT model. The bilingual dataset we built will be available to the public.
... As a result, it is a language of prestige and high social status . Uganda is a multilingual country, where there are up to 65 indigenous ethnic groups and 41 living languages, with Luganda having the largest number of native and non-native speakers (Namyalo, Isingoma & Meierkord, 2016). Consequently, these languages affect, in one way or the other, the way English is used in the country. ...
The study looks at the use of conjunctions among L1 Luganda speakers of English as a second language (L2) in Uganda. Using a corpus compiled from oral and written discourse, the study found that the conjunction mostly used among L1 Luganda speakers of English was “and”, followed by “but”, both of which were marginally used as sentence openers, with the written data showing no single incidence of using “and” in this respect. It was also established that a number of English conjunctions were either totally absent or only used sporadically in both types of discourse. For example, correlatives such as “scarcely…when, no sooner…than” were completely absent from our corpus. Substrate influence from Luganda has been seen to have a role, not least in the co-extensive use of “although/though” with “but” in subordination, although analogy appears to work synergistically with substrate influence here (see Andersen, 1983). Innovations involving the rejection of constructions with the conjunction “if” were observed with regard to what appear to be mixed tenses (e.g. If you did not study chemistry at lower levels, you will not understand this concept), although in L1 English such constructions are legitimate since they do not encode the semantic relation of condition (Swan, 2005). Given that L1 Luganda speakers of English are Ugandans, this aspect of the findings in the study lends itself to observations made in earlier studies (e.g. Ssempuuma, Isingoma & Meierkord, 2016; Isingoma, 2021) on the structural nativization of English in Uganda as well as trends towards endonormativity in the sense of Schneider (2007).
... For example, the equivalents of the verbs afford, reach and peruse in five commonly used Ugandan L1s below (cf. Namyalo et al., 2016) are realized as shown in Table 2 and can be used with postverbal implicit arguments: 6 One important thing that we need to note here is that the L1 verbs in the table above not only mean afford, reach or peruse, but also they mean manage, arrive and read, respectively. In other words, while English has synonyms that behave differently as regards their syntax, the L1s do not have this kind of varied syntax since instead of two verbs with subtle semantic differences, there is only one general verb. ...
In standard British/American English, some transitive verbs, which are ontologically specified for objects, may be used with the objects not overtly expressed (for example, leave), while other transitive verbs do not permit this syntactic behavior (for example, vacate). The former have been referred to as verbs that allow implicit arguments. This study shows that while verbs such as vacate do not ideally allow implicit arguments in standard British/American English, this is permitted in Ugandan English (a non-native variety), thereby highlighting structural asymmetries between British/American English and Ugandan English, owing mainly to substrate influence and analogization. The current study highlights those structural asymmetries and ultimately uncovers some characteristic features in the structural nativization process of English in Uganda, thereby contributing to the growing larger discourse meant to fill the gaps that had characterized World Englishes scholarship, where thorough delineations of Ugandan English have been virtually absent.
... Luganda and Rutooro are Bantu languages, the largest of the language subphyla in Uganda (64.8%), while Acholi is one of the Nilotic languages, the second largest group (28.2%) and Lugbara belongs to the central Sudanic languages, which constitute 6.8% (cf. Namyalo et al. 2016: 27, Eberhard et al. 2019. While the purpose of this study is not to tease out variations stemming from the different L1s, it was necessary to have different L1 speakers so as to have a representative multilingual population, as Uganda is a multiethnic society. ...
This study examines politeness strategies and specific expressions employed by Ugandans when making requests and responding to thanks, against the backdrop that contact phenomena , as one of the key factors that characterize L2 varieties such as Ugandan English, make it virtually inevitable to have peculiarities in this respect. Specifically, in relation to the illocutionary acts of request, Ugandan English relies more on direct strategies (due to substrate influence), with various idiosyncratic mitigating devices such as the use of the past progressive with performative verbs, the use of the lexical mitigator first with imperatives, and the use of verbs with inherent supplicatory semantics in the imperative mood. As regards responses to thanks, while there is a clear preference for exonormative standards, formulae arising from substrate influence are visibly present, while several of the formulae used in L1 English (e.g. Standard British English) are not used in Ugandan English.
... Perspectives on National vis-à-vis Official Languages On official and national languages, Rosendal (2010), as cited in Namyalo, Isingoma and Meierkord (2016), argues that, in the Ugandan contexts, an official language is often considered as synonymous to the national language (see e.g., Nakayiza, 2016, as cited in Isingoma, 2017). In this regard, Cluver (1993) states that a national language is an indigenous language that has been developed to symbolise a specific region or a nation in general. ...
In Uganda and Tanzania, culture policies are among the key documents that provide for the statuses and educational functions of languages in these countries. Tanzania"s culture policy (famously known as Sera ya Utamaduni) explicitly postulates the statuses and the development of languages in its multilingual contexts. In Uganda, while Kiswahili is a foreign as well as the second official language, Uganda"s culture policy provides no references for its teaching in schools. This paper argues that the silence by Uganda"s culture policy to postulate the teaching of Kiswahili in schools contributes towards the further deceleration of its teaching in the country. Using Bowen"s (2009) proposals on text analysis, this paper reviews, compares and evaluates purposely selected texts on language development (mainly, in terms of teaching) from the Sera ya Utamaduni and Uganda National Culture Policy (UNCP). It intends to provide highlights on the Kiswahili (language) teaching gaps in the UNCP with possible solutions to be drawn from Tanzania"s cultural policy. In general, it advocates designing of a comprehensive and viable culture and/or language policy that can benchmark the teaching of Kiswahili (and other languages) within multilingual Ugandan classrooms.
... In 2016, a dedicated volume (Meierkord, Isingoma, & Namyalo, 2016) provided a first detailed description of the sociolinguistic situation and individual features of UgE. More recent research includes Ssempuuma (2019) and Isingoma and Meierkord (2019), both continuing to describe the variety, with the aim of understanding how it is (dis)similar to other varieties of English spoken in East Africa and how this can be reflected in models of world Englishes. ...
... Research has revealed that this influence is very limited in Uganda (Rosendal 2010). Despite its status as a co-official language and the resulting institutional support (particularly as regards Kiswahili as a school subject), Kiswahili seems to play a negligible role in the media, print publications, religion and informal private interactions (Namyalo et al., 2016) and to only have some currency in the Northern province. In fact, Fisher (2000, 58f.) had already concluded that "although genetically similar, in the same way that Australian and New Zealand English share a common ancestor, UE [UgE, cm] has diverged from the other East African varieties", claiming that it is mainly influenced by Luganda, the L1 of 17.98 % of Uganda's population and a widely used L2 in the country. ...
... In Uganda, IaEs are highly likely to take place, given the multilingual nature of the country. They may, for example, involve speakers whose L1s are Acholi, Luganda and Runyakitara (see Namyalo et al., 2016 on details for Uganda's languages). Since these interactions typically occur in very diverse constellations of speakers, a heterogeneous array of linguistic systems is the result, rather than one stable variety. ...
Uganda is a former British protectorate, where English has contributed to the country’s linguistic ecology since 1894, when the British established a protectorate over the area of the Buganda kingdom. Over time, Ugandan English has developed as a nativised second language variety, spoken by Uganda’s indigenous population. At the same time, due to migrations, globalisation and the influence of international media and the Internet, its speakers have increasingly been in contact with varieties other than British English: American English, Indian English, Kenyan English, and Nigerian English may all influence Ugandan English. This paper looks at how Ugandan English can be conceptualised as a variety shaped by other varieties. It reports on the results of acceptability tests carried out with 184 informants in the North, the Central and the West of Uganda and discusses how speakers assess individual grammatical structures used in Ugandan English and in those varieties they are potentially in contact with.
This entry describes Ugandan English as a variety of English spoken mainly in Uganda. The variety is characterised by structural properties that set it apart from Inner Circle varieties or even other Outer Circle varieties, despite displaying notable elements of convergence. The entry highlights both the structural properties and the sociolinguistics of the variety. It underscores the fact that despite the original exogenous nature of English in Uganda and amidst the multilingual situation in the country, English has been nativised substantially and plays a very important role in the lives of Ugandans, spanning public spaces as well as private domains due to not only the prestige bestowed on it in the country, but also its status as an official language and its role as the de facto lingua franca in the country as well as its functionality as a global language.
Like other Englishes, Ugandan English is not a homogeneous variety. Being a second language to the vast majority of its multilingual speakers, it is, inevitably, influenced by their first languages. However, first language influence is just one factor that continues to shape Ugandan English. This paper reports on how influence from exonormative teaching models and the effects of migration, which constantly results in frequent and regular contact between second language speakers of various first languages, contribute to its architecture. It does so by focusing on and carefully investigating future time expressions in a corpus of authentic spoken interactions across Ugandans, the face-to-face conversations of the Uganda component of the International Corpus of English .
