Talk:Runyakitara language

Created

I created this page today and have just added references. This is an interesting and positive example of language planning. Not much time to add more to it now. In general it seems the pages on each of the 4 constituent languages also need a lot of work. Hopefully all this can be done by someone who knows the subject better than I. --A12n 17:33, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Great, thanks for the refs; they might be of help in expanding this article and the other ones. — mark ✎ 07:33, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Name

Why is the article called "Kitara"? All the source I can find call it only "Runyakitara". --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 10:10, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Moved. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:16, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Update Rutara languages instead

I'm not a native speaker, but I've lived in Uganda for half a decade and studied Runyoro-Rutooro extensively, and I can say that pretty much all this page is essentially wrong. First, Runyakitara is not a standardized language, but just another term to refer to the Rutara languages; which are all mutually intelligible and whose classification as a group within the Great Lakes Bantu is academically as well as popularly agreed. Second, unfortunately there's no such a thing as a unified orthography in this language or "language cluster". Although in the beginning of the XX century all shared a literature under the name of Lunyoro (because that's the dialect that the Anglican missioner Maddox chose to translate the Bible) the other dialects created separated orthographies in the year 1952: Runyoro and Rutooro went with "Runyoro-Rutooro", and Runyankore and Rukiga went with "Runyankore-Rukiga". Not sure about Runyambo and Ruhaya. And third, the material that's claimed to be in "Runyakitara" in this page, such as the newspaper Orumuri, is actually written in the standard for Runyankore-Rukiga. The only thing true here is that the University of Makerere has made an effort to make Ugandans aware of the fact that all these dialects are a single language called Runyakitara, and students of Runyakitara study all if not most varieties. Nevertheless, all books published still follow the separate orthographies standardized in 1952, though some of them may have been updated in some way. L. T. Rubongoya addresses this in his A Modern Runyoro-Rutooro Grammar (1999), and O. K. Ndoleriire does so in his Runyoro-Rutooro orthography = Ebiragiro by'empandiika y'Orunyoro-Orutooro (2002) and in the more recent Runyakitara Language Studies - A Guide for Advanced Learners and Teachers of Runyakitara (2022).

For all these reasons I'd recommend to delete this page and redirect to the Rutara languages page, which can and should be polished and updated to reflect the linguistic reality of these dialects. Soguito (talk) 09:02, 21 October 2022 (UTC)