UGANDA

UGANDA. A country of East Africa and member of the COMMONWEALTH. Languages: English (official) SWAHILI, and Luganda and other indigenous, mainly BANTU, languages. English is the language of education, government, and the media. Uganda was visited by Arab traders in the 1830s, by the British explorer Captain John Speke in the 1860s, and in 1888 granted by the Crown to the Imperial British East Africa Company. In 1893, the Company withdrew and the territory was administered by a commissioner, the kingdom of Buganda becoming a British Protectorate in the same year. Between 1900 and 1903, treaties with the four Ugandan kingdoms resulted in the entire territory becoming a protectorate. Uganda gained its independence in 1962. The English of Uganda is a variety of EAST AFRICAN ENGLISH. It is non-rhotic and tends to be stress-timed. Because local Bantu languages generally have only two fricatives, /f, s/, the other English fricatives tend to be obscured: ‘sooeh’ for sure, ‘ferry’ for very. Many do not distinguish r and l: ‘rorry’, ‘lolly’, and ‘rolly’ are all variants for lorry. There are fewer consonants in the vernaculars than in English and consonant clusters are managed by means of an epenthetic vowel (‘sitring’ for string) or by reducing the cluster (in various ways: for example, ‘lents’ or ‘lenss’ for lengths).