The Dholuo dialect (pronounced ) or ''Nilotic Kavirondo'', is a dialect of the
Luo group of
Nilotic languages
The Nilotic languages are a group of related languages spoken across a wide area between South Sudan and Tanzania by the Nilotic peoples.
Etymology
The word Nilotic means of or relating to the Nile River or to the Nile region of Africa.
Dem ...
, spoken by about 4.2 million
Luo people
The Luo of Kenya and Tanzania are a Nilotic ethnic group native to western Kenya and the Mara Region of northern Tanzania in East Africa. The Luo are the fourth-largest ethnic group (10.65%) in Kenya, after the Kikuyu (17.13%), the Luhya ( ...
of
Kenya
)
, national_anthem = "Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu"()
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, image_map2 =
, capital = Nairobi
, coordinates =
, largest_city = Nairobi
, ...
and
Tanzania
Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands and ...
,
[Ethnologue report for Luo](_blank)
/ref> who occupy parts of the eastern shore of Lake Victoria
Lake Victoria is one of the African Great Lakes. With a surface area of approximately , Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area, the world's largest tropical lake, and the world's second-largest fresh water lake by surface area after ...
and areas to the south. It is also spoken by millions in Uganda
}), is a landlocked country in East Africa
East Africa, Eastern Africa, or East of Africa, is the eastern subregion of the African continent. In the United Nations Statistics Division scheme of geographic regions, 10-11-(16*) territor ...
, South Sudan
South Sudan (; din, Paguot Thudän), officially the Republic of South Sudan ( din, Paankɔc Cuëny Thudän), is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered by Ethiopia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the C ...
, and Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
. It is used for broadcasts on KBC (Kenya Broadcasting Corporation
Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) is the state-run media organisation of Kenya. It broadcasts in English and Swahili, as well as in most local languages of Kenya. The corporation started its life in 1928 when Kenya was a British colony. I ...
, formerly the ''Voice of Kenya'').
Dholuo is mutually intelligible with Alur, Lango, Acholi and Adhola
The Adhola people, also known as Jopadhola, are a Nilotic ethnic group of Luo peoples that live in Tororo District of Eastern Uganda and comprise about eight percent of the country's total population. They speak Dhopadhola, (a Luo language), ...
of Uganda
}), is a landlocked country in East Africa
East Africa, Eastern Africa, or East of Africa, is the eastern subregion of the African continent. In the United Nations Statistics Division scheme of geographic regions, 10-11-(16*) territor ...
. Dholuo and the aforementioned Uganda
}), is a landlocked country in East Africa
East Africa, Eastern Africa, or East of Africa, is the eastern subregion of the African continent. In the United Nations Statistics Division scheme of geographic regions, 10-11-(16*) territor ...
languages are all linguistically related to Jur chol of South Sudan and Anuak of Ethiopia due to common ethnic origins of the larger Luo peoples
The Luo, (also spelled Lwo) are several ethnically and linguistically related Nilo-Semitic ethnic groups that inhabit an area ranging from Egypt and Sudan to South Sudan and Ethiopia, through Northern Uganda and eastern Congo (DRC), into we ...
who speak Luo languages
The dozen Luo, Lwo or Lwoian languages are spoken by the Luo peoples in an area ranging from southern Sudan to western Ethiopia to southern Kenya, with Dholuo extending into northern Tanzania and Alur into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. ...
.
It is estimated that Dholuo has 90% lexical similarity with Lep Alur (Alur), 83% with Lep Achol (Acholi), 81% with Lango, and 93% with Dhopadhola (Adhola). However, these are often counted as separate languages despite common ethnic origins due to linguistic shift occasioned by geographical movement.
Literacy (''Of the Luo from South Nyanza)''
The foundations of the Dholuo written language and today's Dholuo literary tradition, as well as the modernization of the Jaluo people in Kenya, began in 1907 with the arrival of a Canadian-born Seventh-day Adventist
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is an Adventist Protestant Christian denomination which is distinguished by its observance of Saturday, the seventh day of the week in the Christian (Gregorian) and the Hebrew calendar, as the Sabbath, and ...
missionary Arthur Asa Grandville Carscallen, whose missionary work over a period of about 14 years along the eastern shores of Lake Victoria
Lake Victoria is one of the African Great Lakes. With a surface area of approximately , Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area, the world's largest tropical lake, and the world's second-largest fresh water lake by surface area after ...
left a legacy. ''(This applies only to the Luo of Southern Nyanza, which are to the East of Lake Victoria).'' This legacy continues today through the Obama family of Kenya and the Seventh-day Adventist Church to which the Obamas and many other Jaluo converted in the early part of the 20th century as residents of the region that Carscallen was sent to proselytize. The Obamas of Kenya are relatives of former US president Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
.
From 1906 to 1921, Carscallen was superintendent of the Seventh-day Adventist Church's British East Africa
East Africa Protectorate (also known as British East Africa) was an area in the African Great Lakes occupying roughly the same terrain as present-day Kenya from the Indian Ocean inland to the border with Uganda in the west. Controlled by Bri ...
Mission, and was charged with establishing missionary stations in eastern Kenya near Lake Victoria and proselytizing among the local population. These stations would include Gendia, Wire Hill, Rusinga Island
Rusinga Island, with an elongated shape approximately 10 miles (16 km) from end to end and 3 miles (5 km) at its widest point, lies in the eastern part of Lake Victoria at the mouth of the Winam Gulf. Part of Kenya, it is linked to Mbita ...
, Kanyadoto, Karungu, Kisii Kisii may refer to:
* Kisii, Kenya, the inaugural capital city of Kenya
* Kisii County, one of the 47 counties of Kenya
* Gucha District, in Kenya, also known as ''South Kisii District''
* Nyamira District, in Kenya, also known as ''North Kisii Di ...
(Nyanchwa), and Kamagambo. In 1913, he acquired a small press for the Mission and set up a small printing operation at Gendia in order to publish church materials, but also used it to impact education and literacy
Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, huma ...
in the region.
Over a period of about five years administering to largely Jaluo congregations, Carscallen achieved a mastery of the Dholuo language and is credited with being the first to reduce the language to writing, publishing the ''Elementary grammar of the Nilotic-Kavirondo language (Dhö Lwo), together with some useful phrases, English-Kavirondo and Kavirondo-English vocabulary, and some exercises with key to the same'' in 1910. Then, just a little more than two years later, the mission translated portions of the New Testament
The New Testament grc, Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη, transl. ; la, Novum Testamentum. (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Christ ...
from English to Dholuo, which were later published by the British and Foreign Bible Society
The British and Foreign Bible Society, often known in England and Wales as simply the Bible Society, is a non-denominational Christian Bible society with charity status whose purpose is to make the Bible available throughout the world.
The Soc ...
.
In 2019, Jehovah’s Witnesses released the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures
The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (NWT) is a translation of the Bible published by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society; it is used and distributed by Jehovah's Witnesses. The New Testament portion was released first, in 1950, ...
in the Luo language. The bible
The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...
translation seeks clear, modern expression and it's distributed without charge both printed an
online versions
The grammar textbook Carscallen produced was widely used for many years throughout eastern Kenya, but his authorship of it is largely forgotten. It was later retitled, ''Dho-Luo for Beginners'', and republished in 1936. In addition to the grammar text, Carscallen compiled an extensive dictionary of "Kavirondo" (Dholuo) and English, which is housed at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
SOAS University of London (; the School of Oriental and African Studies) is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the federal University of London. Founded in 1916, SOAS is located in the Bloomsbury ar ...
, UK. Neither of these works has been superseded, only updated, with new revised versions of the linguistic foundation that Carscallen established in 1910.
Phonology
Vowels
Dholuo has two sets of five vowels, distinguished by the feature /nowiki>">ATR/nowiki> which is carried primarily on the first formant. While ATR is phonemic in the language, various phonological vowel harmony processes play a major role and can change the ATR of the vowel at output. A current change in certain dialects of Dholuo is that certain pronouns seem to be losing the ATR contrast and instead use ATRin free variance.
Consonants
In the table of consonants below, orthographic symbols are included between angle brackets following the IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners ...
symbols. Note especially the following: the use of for , common in African orthographies; , are plosive
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...
s, not fricative
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
s as in Swahili spelling (but phoneme can fricativize intervocalically).
Phonological characteristics
Dholuo is a tonal language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey empha ...
. There is both lexical tone and grammatical tone, e.g. in the formation of passive verbs. It has vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...
by ATR status: the vowels in a noncompound word must be either all ATR ATR may refer to:
Medicine
* Acute transfusion reaction
* Ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3 related, a protein involved in DNA damage repair
Science and mathematics
* Advanced Test Reactor, nuclear research reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory, ...
or all ATR The ATR-harmony requirement extends to the semivowels , . Vowel length is contrastive.
Grammar
Dholuo is notable for its complex phonological alternations, which are used, among other things, in distinguishing inalienable possession
In linguistics, inalienable possession (abbreviated ) is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "ali ...
from alienable. The first example is a case of alienable possession, as the bone is not part of the dog.
:chogo guok (chok guok)
:bone dog
:'the dog's bone' (which it is eating)
The following is however an example of inalienable possession, the bone being part of the cow:
:chok dhiang'
:bone (construct state
In Afro-Asiatic languages, the first noun in a genitive phrase of a possessed noun followed by a possessor noun often takes on a special morphological form, which is termed the construct state (Latin ''status constructus''). For example, in Arabi ...
) cow
:'a cow bone'[Tucker A. N. ''A Grammar of Kenya Luo (Dholuo)''. 1994:198.]
Sample phrases
References
Bibliography
*Gregersen, E. (1961). ''Luo: A grammar''. Dissertation: Yale University.
*Stafford, R. L. (1965). ''An elementary Luo grammar with vocabularies''. Nairobi: Oxford University Press.
*Omondi, Lucia Ndong'a (1982). ''The major syntactic structures of Dholuo.'' Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
*Tucker, A. N. (ed. by Chet A. Creider) (1994). ''A grammar of Kenya Luo (Dholuo).'' 2 vols. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
*Okoth Okombo Okoth is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
*Benard Otieno Okoth, Kenyan politician
*Clive Okoth (born c. 1982), Ugandan airline pilot
*John Eliud Okoth (born 1958), Kenyan field hockey player
*Ken Okoth (1978-2019), Kenyan politic ...
, D. (1997). ''A Functional Grammar of Dholuo.'' Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
* Odaga, Asenath Bole (1997). ''English-Dholuo dictionary.'' Lake Publishers & Enterprises, Kisumu. .
*Odhiambo, Reenish Acieng' and Aagard-Hansen, Jens (1998). ''Dholuo course book.'' Nairobi.
*Capen, Carole Jamieson. 1998. ''Bilingual Dholuo-English dictionary, Kenya''. Tucson (Arizona): self-published. Kurasa ix, 322. [] https://www.webonary.org/dholuo/
External links
Luo phrases and basics
A Handbook of the Kavirondo Language (1920)
– one of the earliest books on Dholuo
{{DEFAULTSORT:Luo Language
Languages of Kenya
Luo languages