Ganda or Luganda[4] (/luːˈɡændə/ loo-GAN-də;[5] Oluganda [oluɡâːndá])[6] is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region.
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".
A segment such as tugg, where a short vowel is followed by a geminate consonant, is very slightly shorter than tuuk or tung.
The approximants /w/ and /j/ are geminated as /ɡːw/ and /ɟː/: eggwanga /eɡːwáːŋɡa/ 'country'; jjenje /ɟːéːɲɟe/ 'cricket'—from the roots -wanga /wáːŋɡa/ and -yenje /jéːɲɟe/ respectively, with the singular noun prefix e- that doubles the following consonant.
The nasals /m/, /n/, /ɲ/ and /ŋ/ can be syllabic at the start of a word: nkima /ɲ̩címa/ (or [n̩tʃíma]) 'monkey', mpa /m̩pá/ 'I give', nnyinyonnyola /ɲ̩ɲiɲóɲːola/ or /ɲːiɲóɲːola/ 'I explain'.
Note that this last example can be analysed in two ways, reflecting the fact that there is no distinction between prenasalisation and gemination when applied to nasal stops.
Luganda is a tonal language, with three tones: high (á), low (à) and falling (â).
[19] Although words like ekitabo are theoretically toneless, they are generally subject to a tone-raising rule whereby all but the first mora automatically acquire a high tone.
The tone-raising rule also applies to the toneless syllables at the end of words like eddwâliro [eddwáalíró] 'hospital' and túgenda [túgeendá] 'we are going', provided that there is at least one low-toned mora after the lexical tone.
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'.
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.
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 'tonal 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'.
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?
In speech, word-final vowels are often elided in these conditioning environments: For example, ekiddugavu /ecídːuɡavu/ 'black' may be pronounced [ecídːuɡavʷu] or [ecídːuɡavʷ].
It is usually realised as a tap or flap [ɾ] after a front unrounded vowel (i.e. after /e/, /eː/, /i/ or /iː/), and as a lateral approximant [l] elsewhere.
The ny combination is treated as a single letter and therefore does not have any effect on vowel length (see the previous subsection).
Finally the sounds /ɲ/ and /ŋ/ are spelt n before another consonant with the same place of articulation (in other words, before other palatals and velars respectively) rather than ny and ŋ: The standard Luganda alphabet is composed of twenty-four letters: Since the last consonant ŋ does not appear on standard typewriters or computer keyboards, it is often replaced by the combination ng' (including the apostrophe).
In some non-standard orthographies, the apostrophe is not used, which can lead to confusion with the letter combination ng, which is different from ŋ.
Some authorities count singular and plural forms as two separate noun classes, but others treat the singular-plural pairs as genders.
Applying the method to Luganda gives ten noun classes, nine of which have separate singular and plural forms.
The singular noun prefix, eri-, is often reduced to e- with an accompanying doubling of the stem's initial consonant.
Their genders must simply be learnt by rote: Adjectives, verbs, certain adverbs, the possessive and a few special forms of conjunctions are inflected to agree with nouns in Luganda.
State is similar to case but applies to verbs and other parts of speech as well as nouns, pronouns and adjectives.
These include nze, ggwe, ye, ffe, mmwe, bo, gwo, gyo, yo, zo, kyo, byo, lyo, go, ko, bwo, lwo, kwo, two, wo and mwo.
True adverbs in the grammatical sense are far rarer in Luganda than in, say, English, being mostly translated by other parts of speech—for example adjectives or particles.
There are also two groups of true adverb in Luganda, both of which agree with the verbal subject or qualified noun (not just in gender and number but also in person), but which are inflected differently.
This is formed by making various changes to the final syllable of the stem, usually involving either changing the final syllable to one of the following suffixes: The modified form of verb stems is the only real source of irregularity in Luganda's verbal system.
It is used with finite verbs to give the sense of continuousness: This is not really a modification but a clitic, so it is always applied 'after' any grammatical inflexions.
Since the words for 'ten', 'hundred', 'thousand' and so on belong to different classes, each power of ten can be inferred from the form of the adjective qualifying it, so the plural forms of the powers of ten (amakumi 'tens', bikumi 'hundreds', bukumi 'tens of thousands' — but not nkumi 'thousands') are usually omitted, as long as this does not result in ambiguity.