Can anyone tell me if Luganda is in the Bantu family of languages?

Just out of curiousity Bob, why do you ask? How did you run across Luganda?

Bob, another good reference for languages is the Ethnologue database. Here's their entry for Ganda (aka Luganda).

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Technical question for zmj or anyone else that knows...

When I see a subject line like this one...I run for the hills!

I am also interested in why you asked the question, Bob, though I'm betting it's because of OEDILF (with "Bantu" being a "b" word and all!).

You'd lose your bet Kalleh.

It,s for an assignment (due in Monday) that I'm writing for my Cert Ed course. I have to profile two of my students, ethnolinguistic factors in their language learning, typical and atypical errors in their spoken and written English etc and provide tailored individual learning plans for them for a ten hour program of learning. One of the two who volunteered is and Iraqi who speaks only Kurdish and the other is a Ugandan who speaks Luganda and Swahili.

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Originally posted by zmjezhd:
Bob, another good reference for languages is the Ethnologue database. Here's their entry for Ganda (aka Luganda).

Do you know of any good web resources discussing the features of the various languages and language groups, things like the phonology and syntax of the languages. I have a copy of Swan and Smith's learner English which has a good section on Bantu languages (mainly focussing on Swahili but near enough I guess)but misses Kurdish altogether - the closest relative given being Farsi and I'm not sure how close that is.

Bob, one of the cool linguistic features of Bantu languages is their large gender system (sometimes called noun classification): up to 22 genders, according to some. Not only do nouns and adjectives agree (correlation of prefixes) with one another based on their gender and number, but the verbs agree with their subjects.

You might want to look at Greville Corbett's Gender. It's in the CUP linguistics series which are usually good and easily available. If you're near a largish university library you can probably find grammars of individual languages or a comparative grammar of all the Bantu languages. There should be plenty of work done by anglophones. London University has a famous school of African and Oriental languages.