Learning Luganda

Although most people I have met here in Uganda speaks good English I have decided to learn as much Luganda as possible. My colleagues at work communicate in Luganda, people in the matatus, in the shops and on the market communicate in Luganda. And most importantly,  a majority of the programs at Mama FM are in Luganda. The language (which has a pronunciation not to different from Swahili – though a bit more complicated), is the most widely spoken of the of 33 different indigenous languages in the country. Actually, more than ten million people speaks Luganda, so it is bigger than Norwegian.

I started the classes about a week ago. First on the list were the  basic greetings, as they are a very important part of a conversation here (the simple and informal ”hei” that we do in Norway will simply not do).  When you meet people in the morning you should say ”Wasuze otyanno nnyabo?” which means something like ”How did you spend the night, madam”? The person will answer ”bulungi, nyabo”, which means ”Well, madam” and then pose the question back for me to give the same answer; ”Bulungi, nyabo..or ”bulungi, ssebo ” if I am talking to a man. Another greeting that is quite common here is the ”Gyebaleko” which means something like ”thank you for your work” or more like ”well done”. People say this to each other all the time. My colleagues keeps saying it to me, although I don’t feel I have done much work here yet.

Apart from bringing big smiles to peoples faces and quite a bit of laughter learning and speaking some Luganda is also a way of learning more about Ugandan culture. There are at least a couple of aspects of the language that I find fascinating. One is the group of words that describe family. In Norwegian (as well as in english and portuguese as far as I know) we call the children of our brothers or sisters nephew or niece. In Luganda, however they don’t, in terms of language anyway, separate your brothers children from your own. You simply call all of them ”my child” –”mwana wange”. Nice, isn’t it? And it says something about the different ways of thinking about family.

Then there is the 10th class of the nouns. It is a class where there is no singular/plural distincton. It’s used for mass nouns, usually in the sense of 'a drop' or 'precious little”. For instance there are two different way of saying water. If you are talking about water in big amounts you would say ”mazzi”, but then there is "tuzzi" , a little drop of precious water. It can also be used about milk.If you are talking about lots of milk you’ll say ”mata”, but if it is only a little drop, so it is precious,  you’ll say ”tuta”.

And for alcohol, for those of you who would like to know how to say my precious little drop of alcohol in Luganda. It's ”twenge”.