ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, day 24: Luganda Luganda is one of the major languages of Uganda
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, day 24: Luganda Luganda is one of the major languages of Uganda and competes in the country with English and Swahili for breadth of use. It’s is a Bantu language, a family of languages that covers almost all of sub-Saharan Africa. Considering the size of the language family it would be nice to give a more specific branch but the internal genealogical structure of the bantu languages is a bit of a mess for modern topologists. Luganda could be classified as “Great Lakes Bantu”, “Northeast Bantu” or even “Zone J Bantu” Like most Bantu languages, Luganda has roughly ten grammatical genders, verbs that agree with subject and object, and is tonal, though it only has three tones; high, falling, and low. If you’re wondering if the “ganda” part of Luganda and Uganda are related, you’re correct! The “Lu” in Luganda is a case marker and “ganda” is an ethonym (name for an ethnic group). A single member of the “ganda” ethnic group is a “muganda”, taking the case normally associated with people. To refer to the people as a whole you pluralize it to “baganda”. The country of these people? Easy, just swap genders to “Buganda”, which is a kingdom within the modern country of Uganda and its namesake. -- source link