Nkore-Kiga is a language spoken by around 5,800,000 people living in the
extreme southwest 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 ...
. It is often defined as two separate languages:
Nkore
Ankole (Runyankore: ''Nkore''), was a traditional Bantu kingdom in Uganda and lasted from the 15th century until 1967. The kingdom was located in south-western Uganda, east of Lake Edward.
History
Ankole Kingdom is located in the South-Wester ...
and
Kiga.
It is closely related to Runyoro-Rutooro.
History
Archibald Norman Tucker
Archibald is a masculine given name, composed of the Germanic elements '' erchan'' (with an original meaning of "genuine" or "precious") and ''bald'' meaning "bold".
Medieval forms include Old High German and Anglo-Saxon .
Erkanbald, bishop of ...
was the Linguistic Expert on Non-Arabic Languages for the government of
Sudan
Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...
and studied Bantu languages in Kenya and Uganda in the 1950s. In 1955, he determined that Nkore and Kiga were dialect variants of the same language and it was not long after that the Ugandan government made this new classification official.
[(Taylor 1985)]
There potentially were some political reasons for this reclassification because it was at around the same time that the Ugandan government abolished the
Nkore Kingdom. Merging the two languages may have been one way the
government tried to ease the integration of the Nkore Kingdom into the rest of the country. By taking away their unique language the government gave them one less way to identify themselves as an independent entity.
Resources
The main resource for Nkore-Kiga is a book written by
Charles V. Taylor titled simply ''Nkore-Kiga''.
See also
*
Runyakitara language
Runyakitara is a standardized language based on four closely related languages of western Uganda:
* Nyoro or ''Runyoro''
* Kiga (Chiga) or ''Rukiga''
* Nkore or ''Runyankole''
* Tooro or ''Rutooro''
Jouni Filip Maho's 2009 New Updated Guthrie ...
References
Languages of Uganda
Nyoro-Ganda languages
{{Bantu-lang-stub