Luganda

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Luganda

 

(also Ganda), the language of the Baganda; belongs to the Bantu language family. Spoken in Uganda by about 2.5 million people (1970).

The phonetic structure of Luganda is characterized by the presence of two distinctive musical tones, high and low. The grammatical structure is distinguished by a system of concord classes marked by disyllabic prefixes. Locative classes are absent in the modern language. Locative meanings are rendered by a nonconcordant form with the prefix e-. In the sentence, the normal word order is subject-predicate-object. Luganda only recently became a written language.

REFERENCES

lakovleva, I. P. lazyk Luganda. Moscow, 1961.
A Luganda Grammar. London, 1954.
Chesswas, I. D. The Essentials of Luganda, 3rd ed. London, 1963.
Snoxall, R. A. Luganda-English Dictionary. Oxford, 1967.

N. V. OKHOTINA

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.