Difference between revisions of "A comparative analysis of Runyankore-Rukiga and Luganda pronominal agreement"

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by Medadi Erisa Ssentanda and Allen Asiimwe

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A Comparative study of Runyankore-Rukiga and Luganda noun class system

Runyankore-Rukiga (RR) and Luganda: an overview

Runyankore-Rukiga (ISO 639-3 nyn for Runyankore and ISO 639-3 cgg for Rukiga) is a central Bantu language spoken in the South-Western part of Uganda in the Kigezi (Rukiga) and the Ankore (Runyankore) regions by four million speakers (Uganda Population and Housing Census: 2002). Earlier scholars (e.g. Ladefoged et al 1971) named these languages according to ethnic groups; but the high lexical similarity that these languages share motivated a merger into one language called Runyankore-Rukiga.

Luganda (ISO 639-3: lug) is a Bantu language which belongs to the subgroup of the Benue-Congo of the Niger-Congo language family. It is spoken in central, and some other parts of Uganda by four million native speakers and four million non-native speakers (Uganda Population and Housing Census: 2002). In the Ugandan context, Luganda is grouped with Lusoga, Lunyole and Lumasaba, as the Eastern inter-lacustrine Bantu languages of Uganda and Runyankore-Rukiga together with Runyoro-Rutooro constitute the Western inter-lacustrine Bantu languages.

Like other Bantu languages characterized by agglutination, RR and Luganda have an a noun class system that involves singular and plural patterns as well as agreement marking triggered by these noun classes. The agreement markers (or, concords) manifest on syntactic constituents like adjectives, numerals, verbs and others.

Generally speaking, RR and Luganda share many features regarding agreement, as it is with other Bantu languages. For Instance, both languages show subject and object agreement in their pronominal morphology. This article is however centered on those instances where Luganda and RR differ in their pronominal concordial agreement marking; but first we would like to give an overview of the noun class systems of both languages.

Bantu noun classes are categorized into noun classes on the basis of the prefixes that they take and it is the system of noun class prefixes that is the hall mark of Bantu nominal morphology(Katamba 2003).

Table 1 showing a juxtaposition of noun classes in Luganda and RR with examples.

Table 1 shows two particular phonological differences between RR and Luganda in the noun class system. RR has class 5 as (e)-ri- while Luganda has it as (e)-li-; and RR has class 16 as wa while Luganda has it as ha. For class 5 of RR to have ‘r’ and not ‘l’ is a fact of phonology of RR and Luganda. Generally, RR has no sound /l/ while Luganda has no sound /r/ (even when it is used in orthography). RR is rich in sound /h/ while Luganda has no such sound in speech except in exclamations. Wherever RR has /h/ Luganda has /w/, for instance RR, hanu here, Luganda wano here.

A noun class is signalled by:

1. a pre-prefix and a prefix attached to the nominal stem for both singular and plural cases.
2. grammatical agreement elements including: subject pronouns, object pronouns, possessive pronouns, adjective prefixes , and other sentence elements. See the following table.

Table II showing noun classes and their concords: RR

In RR and Luganda the SM and OB are the same except for class 9 where the SM is e- and the OM is -gi-. Bantu noun classes normally group into 10 or more singular/plural pairings. For RR and Luganda, classes 1 to 10 pair up as 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, and 9/10 to form singular and plural forms respectively. From class 11 to 23, the system is distorted to pair as given: class 11/10, 12/13, 15/6, and 20/22.

Table II showing noun classes and their concords: Luganda