Abstract
Uganda is a former British protectorate, where English has contributed to the country’s linguistic ecology since 1894, when the British established a protectorate over the area of the Buganda kingdom. Over time, Ugandan English has developed as a nativised second language variety, spoken by Uganda’s indigenous population. At the same time, due to migrations, globalisation and the influence of international media and the Internet, its speakers have increasingly been in contact with varieties other than British English: American English, Indian English, Kenyan English, and Nigerian English may all influence Ugandan English. This paper looks at how Ugandan English can be conceptualised as a variety shaped by other varieties. It reports on the results of acceptability tests carried out with 184 informants in the North, the Central and the West of Uganda and discusses how speakers assess individual grammatical structures used in Ugandan English and in those varieties they are potentially in contact with.
Highlights
Uganda is a country in East Africa, adjacent to South Sudan in the North, Kenya in the East, the Democratic Republic of Congo to the West and Rwanda and Tanzania in the South
Due to migrations, globalisation and the influence of international media and the Internet, its speakers have increasingly been in contact with varieties other than British English: American English, Indian English, Kenyan English, and Nigerian English may all influence Ugandan English
Based on the assumption that Ugandans’ assessments of a structure’s acceptability is constrained by a) the structures that are available in their L1s, which they potentially transfer into their L2 English and find acceptable, and by b) regularly encountering the structure in the English of other speakers, both of UgE and of various other varieties of English, futurity, modals of obligation and ability, and spatial as well as temporal prepositions were chosen as features of analyses
Summary
Uganda is a country in East Africa, adjacent to South Sudan in the North, Kenya in the East, the Democratic Republic of Congo to the West and Rwanda and Tanzania in the South. This paper presents a first step towards assessing how these Englishes influence Ugandan speakers of English, through discussing the results of 184 acceptability tests that probe into how speakers in different parts of the country judge individual English structures that express futurity, obligation, ability and spatial as well as temporal relations. For these five areas, differences exist as regards the way they are expressed in three of the major first languages (L1): Acholi, Luganda, and Runyankore, spoken in the North, the Central and the Western parts of the country
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