Academic literature on the topic 'Luo language (Kenya and Tanzania)'

The Luo are a Nilotic people living in western Kenya, north-eastern Tanzania and in western Uganda. Their language, Dholuo, forms part of the Western Nilotic group of languages. This article presents the traditional kincepts (kinship terminology) of the Luo people as described by elders living in Central Sakwa location, Siaya County, western part of Kenya. The kincepts for consanguine as well as affine relatives in up to three ascending and five descending generations are described. The paper applies a combined linguistic and anthropological approach. Linguistically, the terms are analysed in relation to current Dholuo vocabulary, grammar and modes of expression. Anthropologically, the Luo kinship rules of patrilineality and virilocality are considered. The domain of kincepts is a research field bringing together linguistics, anthropology and history. It contributes to the inquiry of diachronic linguistics, which can provide insights on the development and interaction of related languages as well as population groups’ migratory patterns not least in parts of the world where written historical sources are scarce.

Among the agro-pastoral Kuria people, whose population straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya, many young men are actively engaged in an illicit livestock trade in which cattle stolen in Tanzania—from other Kuria, as well as from neighboring peoples such as the Luo, Ngoreme, and Maasai—are sold to buyers, mainly butchers, inside Tanzania or else are run across the border for cash sale in neighboring Kenya. Kenya is a more affluent country than Tanzania—consequently, the demand for beef is greater there and beef prices are considerably higher. The beef and hides from these stolen Tanzanian cattle also fuel Kenya's meat-packing and tanning industries, and live animals as well as canned beef are reportedly also shipped to buyers in Scandinavian countries and the Persian Gulf.

The region inhabited by the Luo ethnic group in Kenya is disease endemic. However, disease awareness initiatives register low acceptance due to the sociocultural images of disease and illness conceptualized in the local Dholuo language in ways that may contradict modern biomedical knowledge and practice. This article evaluates the sociocultural basis of encoding descriptions of disease in the Luo indigenous knowledge system and their implications for modern medical practice. The methodology entailed use of qualitative interviews of purposively sampled Dholuo-speaking patient escorts in a provincial referral hospital. Nonparticipant observation was also conducted at funerals to monitor contextualized usage of the discourse of disease, illness, and death. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis and categorized into emergent themes and categories. The results revealed that Dholuo is replete with expressions that emphasize the vulnerability and discrimination of the sick. Such attitudes cause rejection of interventions and negatively influence health-seeking behavior. The expressions were relevant and acceptable to cultural insiders; hence, they could determine their understanding of health conditions thereby influencing how they make medical decisions. It emerges that the unique Luo worldview controls their perceptions on the causes of disease and prescribes community-driven remedies which may depart from the expectations of the biomedical model.

This article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using colonial-era boundary placement as a “natural experiment.” Despite similar geography and historical legacies, governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation building. The evidence suggests that nation building has allowed diverse communities in rural Tanzania to achieve considerably better local public goods outcomes than diverse communities in Kenya. To illustrate, while Kenyan communities at mean levels of diversity have 25 percent less local school funding than homogeneous communities on average, the comparable figure in the Tanzanian district is near zero. The Kenya-Tanzania comparison provides empirical evidence that serious reforms can ameliorate social divisions and suggests that nation-building should take a place on policy agendas, especially in Africa.

In this paper, I construct a linguistic framework for understanding contrasting conceptions of political contest. That framework is illustrated by applying it to the particular case of Luo of Kenya in the wider context of the country’s conflictual ethno-politics.The article, which rests on a conception of political contest as a structure of competition in which individuals and ethnic communities compete for political supremacy (over others, or at the expense of others), analyses selected instances of recent texts from online blogs, music and recorded public meetings. The article shows that, just like many other language communities, Luo key concepts and understandings emanate from its social and cultural institutions. Also, as those activities serve as source domains for other areas of social existence, including politics, the article argues that the conceptual metaphors deriving from frames such as POLITICAL CONTEST IS HUNTING/WAR/ WRESTLING/A FOOTBALL MATCH or POLITICAL CONTEST IS WOOING A WIFE are still common among the Luo today, even though some issues like hunting and war are no longer matters of everyday life. As the article argues, understanding the Luo Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) of political contest may be very useful in peace and conflict studies.

This article examines the organisation of concepts of intelligence among the Luo people in rural Kenya. In particular, it discusses what the components of these concepts are; how these components are expressed in the DhoLuo language, how they are interrelated, how they are used in judgements of other people, and how these components of Luo conceptions of intelligence are related to Western conceptions of intelligence. Peer, teacher, and adult in the community ratings of children on Luo components of intelligence are correlated with performance on conventional ability tests and with school achievement. The Luo concept of intelligence is primarily expressed in the DhoLuo vocabulary by four concepts (rieko, luoro, paro, and winjo), which appear to form two latent structures, social-emotional competence and cognitive competence. Indicators of only one of these concepts (rieko) and only one latent structure (cognitive competence) correlate with scores on conventional Western cognitive ability tests and with school achievement in English and mathematics. The article also presents a novel method for analysing data from people’s ratings of each other’s intelligence that is useful when not every one who is providing the ratings knows everyone who is to be rated, and when Likert rating scales are inapplicable.

The article is a plea for sustaining the indigenous languages of Tanzania and Kenya. These languages display an impressive richness in diversity which is diminishing currently. It is important to appreciate the value of the current linguistic diversity and that of multilingualism. The article is based on a presentation at a conference of the Languages of Tanzania project and hence is biased towards the Tanzanian situation. I argue that the success of the language policy of promoting Kiswahili now opens the ways to support the local languages that pose no threat to national unity. Given that this article is a plea and one making ample use of my personal experiences of linguistic research in Tanzania and Kenya the style is more personal and lacks the usual detachment of academic papers.

Death, especially death which comes through disease, is often a hard subject that the human mind wishes to bury deep in the unconscious. The lack of ease with impending death eventually finds expression in everyday discourse. In this paper I look at performance of Covid-19 discourse through humour in a short episode of everyday orality of a Luo community in Uyoma, Siaya, in Kenya. The performance of the everyday language is textualized to display the aesthetics of contextual language through coinage, jokes, and puns, which manifest as humorous responses to an otherwise dire situation. From the feminising of the disease as Acory Nyar China, literally translated as “the petite Cory from China”, to the symbolic naming of aspects of the Covid-19 protocols and verbal jokes about the same, there is an inherent, deliberate attempt to literally laugh in the face of death. The identified aspects of language are treated as metaphorical masks, even as the mask as an object also becomes a metaphor. I employ discourse analysis, which treats language as living social phenomena capable of change, growth, expansion, and adaptation for contextual spatial and temporal expressions.

Different English software products are localized into many native languages spoken around the world, the most popular software products localized so far are word processing software and web browsers. The effort has begun to localize these software products in Kiswahili language which is widely spoken in Tanzania, East and Central Africa. Kiswahiliis an official language of Tanzania, and is a national language in Uganda and Kenya. To make these software products useful to Kiswahili speaking community particularly in Tanzania a new Kiswahili spell checker has been developed and, it uses most of the Kiswahili words spoken in Tanzania and its locale identity is sw-TZ for OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox while Kiswahili spoken in Kenya has a locale identity sw-KE which is common for Microsoft office products. It was developed due to the shortcomings of first ever Kiswahili spell checker developed by Open Kiswahili Localization Project(KILINUX). A spell-checking tool called MySpell has been used in developing a new spell checker. The dictionary of a new spell checker consists of 4894 stems and its affixes were created based on Kiswahili noun classification system and by selecting different groups of verb stems that follow the same trends in generating other Kiswahili valid words. Thispaper addresses the shortcomings of the existing spell checker and the approach carried out to develop a new spell checker.

Corpus-based research is more and more used in linguistics. English varieties are used a lot in daily communications throughout the world. African English varieties are discussed in this paper, including West African English, East African English and South African English. Kenya and Tanzania corpus is the main target corpus while Jamaica corpus is used as a comparative one. The tool used is AntConc 3.2.4.

Makala haya yanatathmini iwapo ukuzaji na uendelezaji wa Kiswahili nchini Kenya unategemea shughuli za kuiendeleza lugha hii zinazofanywa na Tanzania ama unatokana na kutegemeana baina ya mataifa haya katika kukikuza na kukiendeleza Kiswahili. Baadhi ya njia za kuiendeleza lugha zinajumuisha: kuisanifisha, kuifanyia utafiti na kuiimarisha kwa kuitungia kamusi, vitabu vya sarufi, kazi za kisanaa na kuitumia serikalini, mahakamani, katika elimu n.k. Makala haya yanaonyesha kuwa ingawa kuna utegemeano kati ya Kenya na Tanzania katika ukuzaji na uendelezaji wa Kiswahili, Tanzania inategemewa zaidi. Hususan inadhahirishwa kuwa Kenya imeitegemea Tanzania kwa kuagizia machapisho, wataalamu wa Kiswahili mbali na kutumia istilahi na hata kuchuma nafuu mifano ya Tanzania katika utumishi wa umma. Fauka ya hayo, inaonyeshwa kuwa pale ambapo Kenya haijafaidi kutokana na ufanisi wa Tanzania, ikiiga mfano wa Tanzania, upo uwezekano wa kufaulu.

This thesis is a qualitative study of mood and ambiguity in Dholuo, a Nilotic language spoken in western Kenya. It also examines the content of the verb phrase (VP) and the role of tone in the expression of mood in Dholuo. Specifically, the study set out to find out how mood is expressed and how ambiguity is resolved in Dholuo, the modal structure of the language and how it can be explained within Chomsky’s Minimalist Programme (1995), particularly regarding feature checking. The thesis comprises six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction and focuses on background information to set the scene for this study. Specifically, it considers the context and the research methodology, which is mainly qualitative. The researcher’s knowledge of the language is of great importance in this study of mood and ambiguity in Dholuo, and native speakers of Dholuo were consulted to avoid bias. In addition, desk research is carried out. The chapter outlines the objectives, discusses the research problem, motivation, scope and limitations of the study. It explains the language situation in Kenya, the number of languages and their families, dialectal variations, the status of the languages and their use in education and parliament, including the recent provisions made in the 2010 constitution. Chapter One also presents the challenges concerning the language situation. Lastly, a synopsis of each chapter is provided. Chapter Two comprises the literature review. The study is based on mood in Dholuo, but the review first deliberates on how mood is expressed in English, as well as types of ambiguity and interpretations in English language studies. In order to determine how mood is expressed in an African language, the chapter discusses a study on tense, aspect and mood as expressed in Kihavu, a Bantu language spoken in the Kalehe district in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Rusizi/Nyamasheke districts in the Republic of Rwanda. Next, Dholuo descriptive grammars, research and related works are discussed. Presented in Chapter Three is the theoretical framework, the main tenets of the Minimalist Programme (MP) and its aims. The theory is adopted as a tool to handle the data in Dholuo. The chapter also discusses how MP differs from Generative Grammar (GG) and Government and Binding (GB) (Chomsky, 1981), including the problems it aims to resolve that could not be properly addressed by GG and GB. How the theory accounts for the data on mood and ambiguity in Dholuo and its challenges is also discussed. The study hopes to contribute to the Minimalist Programme’s further development and refinement, as most linguistic theories including the MP are informed and inspired by Indo-European languages, particularly English. Chapter Four presents Dholuo's basic morphosyntactic structures, phonology, the morphology of nouns, personal pronouns and verbs, since some of the features in these domains have a bearing on mood. The language known to many as Luo is actually called Dholuo; ‘Dho’ serves as a noun class prefix in Bantu languages, as in ‘ki-‘ for Kiswahili and ‘gi-‘ for Gikuyu. It is a prefix referring to language: ‘the language of’ the Luo people. Mood and ambiguity in Dholuo are discussed in Chapter Five. Types of Dholuo modal auxiliaries are described and instances where there is ambiguity between modal auxiliaries and words belonging to other word categories are mentioned. How MP theory accounts for data on mood and ambiguity in Dholuo, and the problems encountered in the application of this theory, are considered. The label ‘mood’ is adopted for the study as a syntactic/grammatical category. The categories of Dholuo mood and possible word formation processes of inflection and derivation realised on the auxiliary are also discussed. Ambiguity is seen through conversion as a word formation process where there is derivation with no morphological marking, but there is functional shift. The modal auxiliary, which precedes the main verb in a construction, is inserted into its base position in the VP. The inflectional nodes are for feature checking. Chomsky (1993) states that morphology plays an important role in the new theory. The operations in the computational system are driven by morphological and lexical necessity. The amount of movement that takes place in the structure building depends on how rich or weak the morphology of a language is. Chapter Six summarises how mood is expressed in Dholuo, how it is affected by ambiguity in terms of accessing the meaning and the role tone plays in resolving ambiguity so that meaning becomes accessible. The study concludes that this theory is adequate in accounting for the data on mood and ambiguity in Dholuo, although modifications have to be made to cater for the feature checking of Dholuo mood and ambiguity in terms of the creation of some heads. Such modifications include heads for mood and aspectual tone for the auxiliary that derives from a noun or tonal distinction where an auxiliary is used together with the verb from which it derives. This is in line with the idea that the Minimalist Programme is based on feature checking and structure building; both processes are morphologically or lexically driven. The features build the structure. Morphemes are moved out of the lexicon to build the structure. Suggestions for further research based on the limitations of the study are presented. The study focuses only on mood and ambiguity in Dholuo as spoken in western Kenya, although Dholuo is a cross border language. There is an opportunity for further research into Dholuo as it is spoken in Uganda and Tanzania.
African Languages
D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

This chapter examines the role of peer education in the transmission of health-related information in Kenya and Uganda. It focuses particularly on knowledge transmission around family planning and malnutrition, and concentrates on three ethnic groups, the Ganda, Kikuyu, and Luo. The chapter considers the uneven relationship between formal education and changes in health-related behaviours. By focusing on learning rather than teaching, the chapter places emphasis on the context, language, and practice. The chapter observes how behaviours have been adapted through the use of concepts and logics that connect to and resonate with individuals’ worldviews and felt needs, even if they do not immediately replicate these. It notes, however, that this process of vernacularization of biomedical concepts and practices is neither smooth nor organic. In the case studies analysed within the chapter, the translation of family planning and nutritional programmes varied in terms of both its success in aligning local and external goals and the level of engagement of medical organizations. Particular significance is placed on the role of peer associations as venues for the transmission of usable knowledge. The chapter notes that the effectiveness of peer learning through associations was shaped by the historical development of each society’s associational life from the late colonial into the postcolonial periods.