Nkore-Kiga is a language spoken by around 5,800,000 people living in the extreme southwest 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 by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the south-west by Rwanda, and to the ...
. It is often defined as two separate languages:
Nkore and
Kiga. It is closely related to
Runyoro-Rutooro.
History
Archibald Tucker was the Linguistic Expert on Non-Arabic Languages for the government of
Sudan
Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Libya to the northwest, Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the east, Eritrea and Ethiopi ...
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
References
Languages of Uganda
Nyoro-Ganda languages
{{Bantu-lang-stub