Acholi Language Resources

Acholi is a Southern Luo dialect spoken by 1.5 million people in northern Uganda. It is also spoken in South Sudan in Magwi County, Eastern Equatoria.

Uganda is a multilingual country with over 70 estimated languages in active use. English is official, but Luganda and Swahili are the 2nd and 3rd most used languages.

Acholi is a tonal language. It has high, low, downstep high and double downstep high tones, but also two contour tones: one rising and one falling. Thus, some words may be distinguished by tone alone, e.g. bèl (low) 'wrinkled' vs. bél (high) 'corn' and kàl (low) 'place enclosed by a palisade' vs. kál (high) 'millet'. Tone furthermore plays a role in verb conjugation.

A recent Acholi orthography by Janet Lakareber shows that a vowel in the Acholi language has more than two pronunciations. A monosyllabic word in Acholi has 14 different pronunciations.

Society

House

Food

Science

Society

House

Food

Work

Medical