LUGANDA NOUNS: INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY AND TESTS

Koffi (2010) proposes four diagnosis tests for identifying, classifying, and categorizing words in the lexicon of any language. The four tests are the semantic test, the morphological test, the syntactic (or distributional test), and the functional test. In this paper, we put the four tests to a test to see how well they can help identify words in Luganda, a language spoken in Uganda. We find that, though, Luganda is from a different language family than English, the four tests hold well. We conclude that understanding how to use these tests provide teachers with additional insights not only in English, but also in their students native languages. Luganda is a language of the Bantu class of languages of east-central Africa, and it is the main language of Uganda, with approximately ten million speakers. Luganda is used for instruction in primary schools while children undergo the process of learning English, which is the official language of Uganda. In Luganda all the words in a sentenc