15/5/21: I had intended to learn some Luganda….

My attempts to learn languages over the years have met with varying success. The best was learning Indonesian when I was on short term missionary service when I was 18. Not long before I had been attending classes at school headed ‘French’, there is part of me which feels I owe the British tax payer a refund for that, particularly, I don’t think I ever got beyond the idea that a word translates to a single word. Actually being in Indonesia with a fair bit of time on my hands to study, it very quickly became apparent that words cannot meaningfully be translated singly, with very different grammars, concepts of being polite and many other differences. Indeed, the complex interplay between language and culture means that the thought may not have occurred in the first place.

By far my worst attempt to learn a language was Mandarin Chinese whilst working with some international students in Reading. When I tried to practice what I’d learnt in Chinese restaurants I was met with blank bemusement, having to explain that I was trying to speak their language rather defeated the point of doing so. If you’ve not been brought up speaking a tonal language it’s jolly difficult to adjust to a very different way of going about things in adult life, my goodness.

In the time I spent in Tanzania I learnt a certain amount of Swahili. I got the feeling that people appreciated the effort made to speak their own language. Beyond this, what one finds is that the further one is from conurbations the less English is spoken – and indeed, whilst Swahili is the first language for many Tanzanian people, in rural areas this is often not the case with local languages being spoken at home and children not starting to learn Swahili until they get to school. So when travelling away from Dar es Salaam a bit of Swahili was very useful, it was entirely normal to meet shop assistants with no English at all. Also, on one occasion I was in a meeting discussing an afternoon event when one of the participants suggested that something could happen at 9 o’clock. Knowing that in Swahili the numbering of hours starts at what in English we call 6 o’clock I guessed, correctly, that the participant meant saa tisa, literally, hour nine, therefore 3 o’clock. Because of this difference I was always very careful arranging taxis to the airport when one might well be travelling at strange hours of the night and mistakes may not be picked up in the same way.

So, here I am in Uganda. When I arrived I was fully intending to learn Luganda and got as far as buying a Bible with an English version in one column and Luganda and various study aids. But, if you’ll excuse me stating the obvious, there is a rather big difference between buying these things with the intention of using them on the one hand, and actually buckling down and using them to learn. Which I’m afraid I’ve not been doing. The big issue here is how widely Luganda is spoken, to a very large extent it’s restricted to the Central Region as shown on the map above, corresponding to the Kingdom of Buganda. Please note, when somebody says that they are Muganda they mean that they are from Buganda, or the Central Region, easy to assume they are saying that they are Ugandan which is not the case.

So, whilst Luganda is the predominant language in Central Region which includes Kampala, you don’t need to travel very far from here and it is not spoken. According to the Ethnologue website, Luganda is spoken by approximately 1/4 of Ugandan people. In addition to this, it is the nature of capital cities that many people live here for work purposes not having been brought up here, so it is entirely normal to hear Ugandan people speaking English amongst themselves, my experience of living in Dar es Salaam and also visiting Nairobi is that this does not happen in those cities in the same way.

So, from my point of view, learning Luganda living here in Kampala would be a great thing to do and I know would be appreciated by people I meet each day. But I have yet to feel that it would be useful in the same way that knowing a bit of Swahili in Tanzania was useful, everything I need to do, certainly professionally but also personally, can be done in English.

I feel a tinge of sadness writing this. But to speak Luganda at a level where it is easier to communicate in Luganda would take a considerable amount of effort over a sustained period of time. Beyond working at school this is effort I am currently putting into studying the Bible. So beyond a small number of greeting words, I’m not learning Luganda nor am I intending to do so. But if you’d like to try to persuade me that I should be doing so, please do let me know, I’d love you to succeed!