A Handbook of the Ateso Language (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Handbook of the Ateso Language

The Ateso dialect is spoken by a tribe of some people living between Lake Kioga and Mt. Elgon in the Eastern Province of the Uganda Protectorate.' The Teso are a cheerful, industrious people, amenable to control and eminently teachable. Although now for some six. Years only in close contact with civilization, the tribe has. Made phenomenally rapid progress in the arts of peace; the culti vation of cotton and labour on the construction of metalled roads has provided even the poorest peasants with abundant cash, and European articles, from cigarettes to bicycles, are in eager demand.

Yet the name of this tribe does not appear, so far as the writer is aware, in any of the works on the peoples of the Uganda Protectorate. The Teso appear to belong to the same Nilotic group as the Nandi, Turkana and Karamojo tribes, and the language has affinities with Masai. The dialect is given by Sir H. H. Johnston, in his work The Uganda Protectorate, as Elgumi, a name which the Rev. W. Crabtree suggests has been applied to the tribe by the Masai (engame the nose) owing to the frequent occurrence of the velar nasal fig. It is, however, doubtful if the sound in question is associated by natives with nasal utterance; it is more prob able that the word is the Masai I lkume, one of their names for the Turkana tribe, who speak a dialect nearly resembling Ateso.

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