“My parents have 30 kids and my mother is a goat”

    Learning a new language is always filled with fun mistakes and mishaps. We’ve been learning our local language Runyanchore/Rukiga, a language spoken in the Southwest of Uganda. Spelling is subjective (I’ve seen about five different ways to spell the name of the language) and the locals mix up their R’s and L’s when speaking English. This leads to endless entertainment for us muzungus. For example, we have Ilish potatoes for dinner and I sleep on a pirrow. We’ve had a record-short amount of time to learn our local language, what with the shortened Pre-Service Training and the holidays over Christmas; thirteen days in total. Our language trainer Bernard is fantastic, he has been a great resource and our cultural guide to all things Ugandan. He’s always willing to help us find things in town or work out a deal at a local store. He has a wonderful way of speaking, in which he finishes sentences with “what?” and answers his own question. “We are preparing for the what? For the LPI.” It’s a typical Ugandan way of phrasing things, and it cracks me up.

 At the end of our language training, we have to pass a Language Proficiency Interview, basically a one-on-one recorded 30-minute conversation with one of the Peace Corps staff to determine our language level. I recently got my results at the end of training and passed with Intermediate Mid! I was practicing my language skills with my host brother Bruce and made the mistake of saying my mom is a goat, embuzi sounds very close to omushubuzi, a business person. Kabayo, my LPI interviewer, also got a kick when I mixed up 3 and 30 for how many kids my parents have. Another fun thing is the plethora of food names that are very close in spelling to inappropriate body parts. For example, rice and penis are one letter off, and meat and vagina sound uncannily similar. All this makes for endless entertainment for our Ugandan counterparts when we order a plate of vagina. I’ve been picking up a little Uganglish myself, including the use of the word “somehow.” Here is a typical conversation with my host sister:

Me: “How was your weekend?”

Zainab: “Somehow.”

Me: “Sounds…great?”

Ugandans also use the word “pick” (sans preposition) for everything, like “Are you picking me?” to see if you are understanding, and “She is not picking!” when your friend isnt’ picking up the phone. And when you want someone to move over in the taxi, matatu or bus? “Extend, extend!!!” In other words, don’t be alarmed when I come back to America in two years speaking a very strange dialect of English.

And then there’s always the double-syllable words, like “Hel-ep yoursel-ef!”