Nyoro-Tooro is a language spoken by around 1,200,000 people living in
western Uganda
The Western Region of Uganda is one of four regions in the country of Uganda
Uganda, officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered to the east by Kenya, to the north by South Sudan, to the west ...
. It is often defined as two separate languages:
Nyoro and
Tooro, though it is defined as one language by the
Ministry of Education
An education ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for education. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of Education, Department of Education, and Ministry of Pub ...
in Uganda. It is closely related to
Runyankore-Rukiga.
Orthography
Comparison of Nyoro and Tooro
Nyoro and
Tooro are very similar in many aspects, but differ in several ways as well.
Tone
Both languages are
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 oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasi ...
s where high and low tones (or H and L) are the essential tones. However, Nyoro has both lexical and grammatical tone, whereas Tooro only has grammatical tone. This means that some homophones in Tooro are differentiated in Nyoro.
Word formation
There are many instances where the two languages have slightly different words. These minor variations include different consonants, vowels or vowel lengths.
Notes
References
Nyoro-Ganda languages
Languages of Uganda
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