Languages of Uganda

Uganda is a multilingual country. Forty of its living indigenous languages fall into three main families — Bantu, Nilotic, and Central Sudanic — with another two languages in the Kuliak family.

English, inherited from the colonial period, and Swahili, which is regionally important, are official languages. Including second-language speakers, there are more speakers of Swahili than English in Uganda. There is also a Ugandan Sign Language.

In all of the Bantu speaking areas of Uganda, dialect continua are very common. For example, people around Mbarara speak Nkole and people from Fort Portal in Toro District speak Tooro, but in the area between those towns, there are villages where most of the people speak a dialect that is best characterized as intermediate between Nkole and Tooro. In recognition of the closeness of four of these languages (Nkole, Tooro, Kiga, and Nyoro), and to facilitate work in them such as teaching, a standardized version called "Runyakitara" was developed around 1990.

In south central Uganda, the Bantu languages of Luganda and Soga are largely interintelligible. This dialectic similarity also extends to the Lussese language spoken in the Ssese Islands of Lake Victoria.

Of Nilo-Saharan, the Eastern Sudanic branch is well represented by several Nilotic languages, eastern as well as western. Eastern Nilotic languages include Karamojong of eastern Uganda (population 370,000), the Bari languages in the extreme north-western corner (about 150,000 population), and Teso south of Lake Kyoga (999,537 population). Alur (population 459,000), Acholi, Lango, Adhola, and Kuman of eastern Uganda are Western Nilotic Luo languages. (Acholi and Lango are interintelligible, and sometimes the term "Luo" is used to cover them.)

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