Угандадағы ганда тілі

Bantu language of Uganda

Ganda or Luganda (/l//uː/'/ɡ//æ//n//d//ə/ looGANdə, Oluganda, ) 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 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 defacto 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%.

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.

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
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 (e. g. gw or ly) 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 (okukóoká 'to cry'), those with a short vowel followed by a geminate consonant (okubôbbá 'to throb'),

Although words like ekitabo are theoretically toneless, they are generally subject to a tone raising rule whereby all but the first mora acquire a high tone. Thus ekitabo 'book' is pronounced and ssomero 'school' is pronounced (where the long consonant counts as the first mora). These tones 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 (that is, the high tones of individual words) 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 '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 (see above). A plateau cannot be formed between a lexical tone and a 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 high tone of either sort. So in abántú mú Úgáńda 'people in Uganda', there is a plateau from the phrasal tone of tú to the lexical tone of gá, and in túgendá mú lúgúúdó 'we are going into the street', there is a plateau from the phrasal tone of ndá to the phrasal tone of dó. 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, Baganda 'they are Baganda' has LHHL, but adding the initial vowel a gives Abaganda 'Baganda people' with LLHLH. (Here, long vowels are transcribed double rather than with the length mark , to allow for tones to be written on each mora.) Different verb tenses have different tonal patterns. The tones of verbs are made more complicated by the fact that some verbs have a high 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? '.

Luganda has a closed set of pronouns.

Luganda can have self standing/independent personal pronouns and pronouns that are prefixed to the verb stem.

Tense–aspect–mood in Luganda is explicitly marked on the verb, as it is in most other Bantu languages.

Abantu bazaalibwa nga balina eddembe n'obuyinza ebyenkanankana, batondebwa nga balina amagezi era nga basobola okwawula ekirungi n'ekibi bwebatyo, buli omu agwana okuyisa munne nga muganda we.