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The Ganda language, Luganda〔 (,〔Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh〕 ''Oluganda'' (:oluɡáːnda)〔''Luganda Basic Course'', p.144.〕), is the major language of Uganda, spoken by five million Ganda and other people principally in Southern Uganda, including the capital Kampala. It belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger–Congo language family. Typologically, it is a highly agglutinating language with subject–verb–object word order and nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment. With about four million first-language-speakers in the Buganda region and a million others who are fluent, it is the most widely spoken Ugandan language. As second language it follows English and precedes Swahili. The language is used in some primary schools in Buganda as pupils begin to learn English, the primary official language of Uganda. Until the 1960s, Ganda was also the official language of instruction in primary schools in Eastern Uganda. == Phonology == 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". Luganda is also a tonal language; the change in the pitch of a syllable can change the meaning of a word. For example the word ''kabaka'' means 'king' if all three syllables are given the same pitch. If the first syllable is high then the meaning changes to 'the little one catches' (third person singular present tense Class VI ''ka-'' of ''-baka'' 'to catch'). This feature makes Luganda a difficult language for speakers of non-tonal languages to learn. A non-native speaker has to learn the variations of pitch by prolonged listening. Unlike some other Bantu languages, there is no tendency in Luganda for penultimate vowels to become long; in fact they are very frequently short, as in the jcity name Kampala ''Kámpalâ'', pronounced (), in which the second vowel is short in Luganda.〔''Luganda Basic Course'', p.105.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Luganda」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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