Africa Pathways: Survey in Uganda

Typical cluster of homes in northern Uganda.

In spring term 2012, one of my linguistics classes at UW was “Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles.” To give you the short definition, pidgins and creoles are basically “mixed” languages that started for purposes of trade and basic communication; a creole has developed to the extent that it has native speakers. For that class, my partner and I did a term project that involved a linguistic analysis of a language called Nubi Creole Arabic, or “Nubi” for short. Last month, almost three years later, the director of our Uganda team expressed an interest in Nubi and suggested that the survey team plan a trip to Uganda to research it.

Starting off on the road north out of Kampala...lots of bananas!

Coffee beans drying in the first town we stopped in.

Nubi grew out of a pidgin Arabic that was widely used in the 1800’s in what is now South Sudan, by traders and the Egyptian military. The Nubis probably ended up in Uganda because they were soldiers of Amin Pasha, who invaded Uganda. Because of the military history of the language, it got spread around a lot; currently there are Nubi people living in various locations all over Uganda and neighboring Kenya. Part of the Nubi tribe’s claim to fame is that it produced Idi Amin.

To survey the language, we flew to Entebbe in the far south of Uganda and drove up to the far northwest corner, right by the borders of Congo and Sudan. We stopped in a few different areas with a relatively high number of Nubi speakers to connect with the community leaders and interview groups of people. I want to share with you some pictures and parts of the experience.

The Nubi people are not Christians, but were very welcoming and helpful; they were enthusiastic about their language and interested in seeing it developed. We got lots of information about the history and culture of the people as well as linguistic information.

A group meeting.

In general they are a very multilingual people. Our first group interview was held in at least five different languages. Swahili isn’t the common language in Uganda like it is in Tanzania, but many Nubi do speak at least some Swahili. They also tend to learn the local language, at least some English, and variety of Arabic called Juba that’s very similar to Nubi. Even the team on this survey trip was unusually multilingual; we had two Ugandans with us who were very helpful with translating between various languages such as Luganda in the south, Lugbara in the north, and Juba Arabic.

I work on taking a wordlist from a small group of Nubi men.

So why would they need language development in Nubi? Well, their acquisition of other languages doesn't mean Nubi isn't used. They reported using Nubi for just about everything! Not only that, but the language group expands as people around pick up the language and marry into the tribe. They have a very strong sense of their identity and culture, and the language is a big part of that. It's still the language that speaks to their hearts. It seems pretty clear to us from the survey that if the Nubi are to be reached with the gospel, it will have to be through their own language. Pray that God will open doors for that to happen.