Varieties of English spoken in Africa have in general remained understudied in the twentieth century, partly as a consequence of the paucity of actual language data sources. Within East Africa, Uganda's unusual colonial history also meant the country often escaped focused academic attention, with the result that the variety of English spoken in Uganda was often conflated with those of its English-speaking neighbours such as Kenya and Tanzania.
This volume is a welcome and perhaps overdue contribution to the study of Ugandan English (UgE), a first description of the variety that looks not only at the historical contexts and present-day sociolinguistics of English in Uganda (including attitudes to UgE), but also provides thorough analyses of UgE's structural characteristics.
The book starts off with an Introduction written by two of the three editors, and continues with ten chapters organized into four parts: part I ‘The context’ (two chapters); part II ‘Functions of English in multilingual Uganda today’ (two chapters); part III ‘Features of Ugandan English’ (five chapters); and part IV ‘Ugandan English and beyond’ (one chapter).
In their Introduction, entitled ‘Ugandan English: Challenges to, and food for, current theories’, two of the volume editors, Bebwa Isingoma and Christiane Meierkord, provide the context for understanding the importance of the volume. First, Uganda's troubled political past has resulted in very little existing linguistic data, which has in turn led to very little attention being bestowed on this variety, at the expense of other, better documented neighbouring varieties. The shortage of datasets representing African varieties of English (compared to other regional varieties of English) has been pointed out (see e.g. Nelson & Ozón Reference Nelson, Ozón, Low and Pakir2017); recently, however, steps have been taken to redress this imbalance. Within the International Corpus of English project itself, corpora of African varieties are either already available (Nigeria and East Africa, the latter including Kenya and Tanzania) or are being compiled (Ghana, Namibia, Uganda). Some of the chapters in this volume employ ICE-Uganda (www.ice-corpora.uzh.ch/en/joinice/Teams/iceug.html) as the source of data for addressing empirical investigations. Isingoma and Meierkord are keen to foreground the fact that, despite commonalities with other East African Englishes, Ugandan English (UgE) has individual characteristics that distinguish it from the English varieties spoken in Kenya and Tanzania. These differences are due to two main reasons: not only is Uganda's (post-)colonial history different from that of, for example, Kenya and Tanzania, but also one of the co-languages of UgE, Kiswahili, is not a ‘home-grown’ language for the majority of the population, a theme later taken up by Namyalo, Isingoma and Meierkord's chapter in this volume.
According to Isingoma and Meierkord, Uganda provides a fertile testing ground for current models of World Englishes, such as Schneider's (Reference Schneider2003) Dynamic Model, Meierkord's (Reference Meierkord2012) Interaction across Englishes, and Mair's (Reference Mair2013) World System of Englishes (see e.g. Seoane Reference Seoane, Seoane and Suárez-Gómez2016 for an overview of the models). While the characteristics of UgE place it firmly in the nativisation stage according to Schneider's model (e.g. heavy borrowing, phonological variability and structural nativisation), the editors point out that, as a British protectorate, Uganda had only a low settler population, which could not have played a significant role in the development of UgE, as required in this model. The authors raise the interesting question of whether post-protectorate varieties are able to skip phase 2 in the Dynamic Model, in which levelling across the settlers’ dialects would have occurred. They link this to the intermediate space between ESL and EFL that postcolonial varieties seem to occupy, a topic of very current relevance (see e.g. Mukherjee & Hundt Reference Mukherjee and Hundt2011). Meierkord's Interactions across Englishes (IaE) model (Reference Meierkord2012) draws inspiration from Mufwene (Reference Mufwene2001), whereby speakers select from an array of language features available in a feature pool. This pool is constantly being fed into by various speakers in various interactions; the resulting formal hybridity (or ‘heterogeneous array of linguistic systems’, p. 6) would be the result of the recombination of existing features. Given the multilingual nature of the country, IaEs are highly likely to take place, including those involving speakers with different indigenous L1s. Finally, Mair's model (Reference Mair2013) helps to map the influence of other Englishes in UgE, especially Indian English, Nigerian English, Kenyan English and Jamaican English. The Introduction thus sets the scene for the volume, with historical and sociolinguistic considerations contributing to an understanding of formal structures, all brought together under models of postcolonial Englishes, which allows for comparisons between UgE and other African varieties.
After the Introduction, part I consists of two contributions which over fifty pages provide a panorama of the language situation in Uganda today, as well as of the history of the English language in Uganda.
The first chapter in this section, by Saudah Namyalo, Bebwa Isingoma and Christiane Meierkord, is entitled ‘Towards assessing the space of English in Uganda's linguistic ecology: Facts and issues’. The authors describe how English is positioned within Uganda's present-day multilingual language ecology. The chapter discusses the different languages present in the country and explains their different (if often overlapping) functions roles (e.g. as medium of instruction, as written and oral languages, etc). Particular attention is paid to the status and function of Kiswahili and Luganda, the ‘usual suspects’ providing the main substrate influence on UgE. The authors also elaborate on the discussion started in the Introduction on similarities between ‘post-protectorate and previous colonies’ (p. 9) with regards to the use and status of English.
Christiane Meierkord next focuses on the history of English in Uganda up until today in her chapter ‘A social history of English(es) in Uganda’. Uganda became a British protectorate in 1900, at which point English was made the official language used for administration of the protectorate. English quickly became the medium of instruction and thus gained the associations with social status and prestige which access to education normally brings. The lack of a settler strand in Uganda is examined in relation to its sociolinguistic importance and related to Schneider's model (Reference Schneider2003), and this leads to an appreciation of similarities and differences between Uganda and other countries in East Africa. The author goes on to identify the dangers of conflating the use of English in Uganda with that of its neighbours. This is a recurrent topic of the volume, and is revisited in following chapters.
Part II focuses on the sociolinguistics of the English language in multilingual Uganda, and on its role as medium of instruction in primary schools. Judith Nakayiza's chapter, ‘The sociolinguistic situation of English in Uganda: A case of language attitudes and beliefs’, underlines the enormous influence, status and prestige that English enjoys in Uganda, despite the fact that many Ugandans do not speak the language. English remains the language that allows social mobility, even if other languages such as Luganda are increasingly being used for a much larger variety of functions (i.e. not just limited to expressing solidarity). The chapter examines the role that English as an ethnic-neutral language is believed to play in the construction of Uganda's national identity, and it ends by considering Ugandans’ attitudes towards UgE.
The chapter by Medadi Ssentanda (‘Tensions between English medium and mother tongue education in rural Ugandan primary schools: An ethnographic investigation’) discusses language policy in education and examines the practical consequences of choosing a given medium of instruction at primary school level. Ssentanda focuses on a rural district which has undergone the transition from using a mother tongue to using English as a medium of instruction (EMI). The implementation of language policy is shown to vary according to whether a school is private or government-aided; this in turn results in delays in learning, with most students being able to learn through EMI in year six and not year five as required by official policy.
Against the historical and sociolinguistic background established in parts I and II, part III provides comprehensive descriptions of UgE over 130 pages (almost half the volume). The five chapters in this section discuss how UgE differs from both British and American English, despite a concern with exonormative standard British English. The contrastive focus is firmly placed on identifying (i) overlaps with other L2 East African varieties, and (ii) unique features of UgE. Part III is the core of the volume, and in addressing both formal as well as social descriptions of UgE, it makes a very welcome contribution to the study of African Englishes.
The first chapter in part III is Christiane Meierkord's chapter ‘Diphthongs in Ugandan English: Evidence for and against variety status and interactions across Englishes’. The author compares the English diphthongs produced by speakers of different L1s (Acholi-Lango, Luganda and Runyankole-Rukiga) in UgE. Her results are based on empirical data, and refine previous findings in the literature: (i) speakers of East African Englishes do produce diphthongs, and (ii) Luganda is seen not to be the only/main influence in UgE. The data illustrate consistent variation according to the three groups of speakers investigated, and the results tie in with the author's IaE model, whereby speaker interactions contribute accents and pronunciation features to a variety, features which become available for other speakers to adopt.
Next, Bebwa Isingoma (‘Lexical borrowings and calques in Ugandan English’) investigates UgE as used in the nation's newspapers to describe how its lexicon draws on the native indigenous languages of Uganda for loanwords and/or calques. The author observes that UgE is largely influenced by traditional, indigenous Bantu languages (thus ruling out Kiswahili, which has only a minority migrant speaker population in Uganda). This sets UgE apart from Kenyan and Tanzanian English, whose borrowings are mainly drawn from Kiswahili. Morphemic borrowings in UgE from Bantu are shown to be a strong indicator of the intensity of language contact between donor and recipient languages in Uganda.
In the following chapter, ‘The use of the progressive in Ugandan English’, Jude Ssempuuma, Bebwa Isingoma and Christiane Meierkord analyse English oral data produced by speakers of the three L1s discussed in Meierkord's chapter on diphthongs. The authors concentrate on the extended use of the progressive, a very frequent phenomenon in L2 varieties of English. They find that divergent uses of the progressive correlate with speakers’ L1s. This suggests the effects of cross-linguistic influence, as well as confirming researchers’ suspicions that UgE may not be a homogeneous variety at all levels of description.
Bebwa Isingoma (‘The use of ditransitive constructions in Ugandan English’) focuses on the (preferred) use of ditransitive verb constructions. In this chapter, speakers of UgE appear to prefer non-canonical prepositional constructions for benefactive verbs (e.g. I've poured for you some tea) as the unmarked variant, that is, without any pragmatic considerations playing a part in speakers’ choice (e.g. animacy, information status, or heaviness/complexity of the referents of the NPs involved). At the same time, speakers find double object constructions with many benefactive verbs ungrammatical (e.g. I've poured you some tea). The author argues that this idiosyncratic (and categorical) use of ditransitives is a consequence of Ugandan Bantu languages, and reflects the nativisation of UgE as per Schneider's (Reference Schneider2003) model. The preference for the prepositional phrase construction in UgE is indeed perplexing. In her discussion of typological preferences, Michaelis (Reference Michaelis2014) claims that African pidgin and creole languages tend to favour double object constructions, despite their European lexifiers favouring prepositional constructions. This chapter also gives rise to some methodological concerns, mainly to do with the nature of the data. Firstly, looking at local newspapers, other writings, elicitation tests and focus group interviews allows the researcher to examine what is possible in a variety, but does not warrant the identification of general preferences. This would be possible when a representative sample of UgE (including various genres as well as written and spoken language) is compiled and released. Secondly, the respondents providing grammaticality judgements in this chapter are all language experts (they had all been students of English language at university), and whether their judgements represent the expected variation in UgE users is moot. ICE-Uganda would be the first locus for testing the findings in this chapter. Finally, the verb give is the prototypical ditransitive verb, yet it is hardly mentioned in the chapter, which is a missed opportunity to contrast its behaviour in UgE and in other World Englishes (Mukherjee & Hoffmann Reference Mukherjee and Hoffmann2006; Mukherjee & Schilk Reference Mukherjee, Schilk, Navalainen, Taavitsainen, Pahta and Korhonen2008).
Christiane Meierkord (‘Speech acts in Ugandan English social letters: Investigating the influence of sociocultural context’) next provides a study of the social letters contained on ICE-Uganda. The author identifies a high proportion of explicit, direct speech acts (reflected in explicit speech act verbs), and thus highlights how notions of politeness are culturally bound. Her results reveal interesting differences between UgE and many other L2 varieties, including Kenyan English (as captured in the sister corpus ICE-East Africa).
The volume ends with part IV, which consists of Claudia Rathore-Nigsch and Daniel Schreier's contribution, entitled ‘Indian English in Uganda: The historical sociolinguistics of a migrant community’. The authors look at the social history of the Indian population in Uganda, focusing on its internal heterogeneity, social stratification, and contacts with the local populations. The community has been a very much segregated one, maintaining little contact with either the African population or the British residents in the country.
This is a fascinating volume, and a very valuable and welcome contribution to the study of African Englishes. Both African and European scholars come together in this volume to offer their perspectives on the role, function and structure of the English language in Uganda's multilingual setting. The characterisation of the variety is detailed and thorough, and many questions are raised for further research.
The research methods employed in the different chapters are also quite diverse, including for example ethnographic and observational methods as well as variationist sociolinguistics, which are used to address data gathered from interviews, archives and corpora. However, the application of these research methods is not always done evenly.
As mentioned in the Introduction, researchers are confronted with a lack of available data on UgE. Besides employing established data collection instruments (e.g. participant observation, elicitation tests, focus group interviews, etc.), some chapters in this volume resort, out of necessity, to ad hoc, opportunistic datasets (e.g. signage, song lyrics, qualia, ‘gleanings’ from headlines in local newspapers, overheard conversations and other ephemera). This heterogeneous assemblage of information is often hard to marshal into a consistent design, where the different data are able to ensure triangulation. The reported results of studies based on such varied sources of data thus provide a valuable glimpse into very complex realities, but (even if we do away with replicability concerns) they make only a modest contribution in terms of generalisable findings with which to paint the larger picture of English in Uganda. Nonetheless, the volume is very successful in whetting researchers’ appetite for further research.
