‘Spewing buffalos’: Uganda’s ‘Uglish’
‘Spewing buffalos’:
A“detoother” or a “dentist” is a gold-digger looking for a wealthy partner, while “spewing out buffalos” means you can’t speak proper English. And a “side-dish” isn’t served by a waiter. Those and other terms are articles in Uganda’s strange, often funny locally-adapted English known as “Uglish,” which is now published for the first time in dictionary form. “It is so entrenched right now that, even when you think you cannot use it, you actually find yourself speaking Uglish,” Bernard Sabiiti, the author of the first Uglish dictionary, told AFP. “Even as I was researching, I was surprised that these words are not English because they were the only ones I knew. A word like a ‘campuser’-a university student-I used to think was an English word.”“Uglish: A Dictionary of Ugandan English,” which went on sale in bookshops across the east African country late last year, contains hundreds of popular Uglish terms, some coined by Ugandans as far back as the colonial period. Sabiiti, 32, said the informal patois was greatly influenced by the local Luganda language, and is a “symptom of a serious problem with our education system” that he claims has been deteriorating since the 1990s.
Uglish is largely dependent on sentences being literally translated, word for word, from local dialects with little regard for context, while vocabulary used is derived from standard English. Meantime, Sabiiti says, influence from the Internet, local media and musicians have seen additional words and phrases created and slowly enter the lexicon.
The result is colorful but at times confounding expressions. If you haven’t seen someone for a while, for example, you’re “lost”, while if you “design well”, you are snappy dresser. Today, Uglish is used by people from all walks of life, but particularly popular with youths. English is the working language in Uganda, and it remains the only medium of instruction in schools and in official business. But Sabiiti said everyone from the president to simple farmers speak at least some Uglish, which varies according to region, tribe and gender, and is regularly seen on signposts.”MPs are almost notorious at using Uglish, you see it in parliamentary debates,” said Sabiiti.