Masaba sometimes known as Gisu (Lugisu) after one of its dialects, is a Bantu language spoken by about 1,500,000 people in eastern Uganda

Uganda

Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...

 in the administrative region of Bugisu on the border to Kenya

Kenya

Kenya , officially known as the Republic of Kenya, is a country in East Africa that lies on the equator, with the Indian Ocean to its south-east...

. The language is closely related to, and mutually intelligible with Bukusu

Bukusu language

Bukusu is a Luhya language from Bantu group spoken by the Bukusu people of western Kenya. It is one of the related languages of the Luhya people...

, spoken in western Kenya

Kenya

Kenya , officially known as the Republic of Kenya, is a country in East Africa that lies on the equator, with the Indian Ocean to its south-east...

. Its speakers, formerly known as the Bagisu

Bagisu

The Gisu people, or Bagisu , alternately Gishu, Masaba, or Sokwia, are a tribe of the Masaba nation of eastern Uganda, closely related to the Bukusu people of Kenya...

, prefer to be called Bamasaba

Bamasaba

The Masaba people, or Bamasaaba, are a Bantu people inhabiting the Eastern Ugandan districts of Sironko, Manafwa, Bududa,Mbale and Bulambuli. They are Closely related to the Bukusu and Luhya of Western Kenya, they are a mainly agricultural people, farming millet, bananas and sorghum on...

. Masaba is the local name of Mount Elgon

Mount Elgon

Mount Elgon is an extinct shield volcano on the border of Uganda and Kenya, north of Kisumu and west of Kitale.- Physical features :It is the oldest and largest solitary volcano in East Africa, covering an area of around 3500 km²....

. Like other Bantu languages, Masaba has a large set of prefixes used as noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...

 classifiers

Classifier (linguistics)

A classifier, in linguistics, sometimes called a measure word, is a word or morpheme used in some languages to classify the referent of a countable noun according to its meaning. In languages that have classifiers, they are often used when the noun is being counted or specified...

. This is similar to how gender

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

 is used in many Germanic

Germanic languages

The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

 and Romance languages

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

, except that instead of the usual two or three, there are around eighteen different noun classes, most of them rather only generally defined. The language is tonal

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

 and has a quite complex verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

 morphology.

Consonants

	labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...		Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...		Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...		Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	m		n				ŋ
Plosive	p	b	t	d			k	g
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...	f	β	s	z
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...			l		j

External links

• Kulomba Kwikumutikinyi Portions of the Book of Common Prayer
  Book of Common Prayer
  The Book of Common Prayer is the short title of a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion, as well as by the Continuing Anglican, "Anglican realignment" and other Anglican churches. The original book, published in 1549 , in the reign of Edward VI, was a product of the English...
  
  in Masaba (1907) digitized by Richard Mammana and Charles Wohlers