摘要：This article discusses the impact of linguistic and non-linguistic factors on the use of the pre-prefixin an under-described Bantu language spoken in Tanzania.1 The pre-prefix, also referred to as theaugment, is a morpheme related to givenness2 in many Bantu languages. We will explore its use inLuguru, which is spoken in the Morogoro region in Tanzania. While the pre-prefix occursfrequently in Luguru, it is barely used in most of the neighbouring languages, which is unexpectedsince the languages are highly similar when it comes to grammatical structure. What is more,certain groups of Luguru speakers use the pre-prefix much more than others, and its use seems tovary according to social settings. We present a sociolinguistic analysis of the contexts where thepre-prefix can appear, including attitudes and social factors, taking into account the situation ofintense language contact between Luguru and the dominating language Swahili, where the preprefixis non-existent. Not much has been published on Luguru overall, and this is the first studyof the pre-prefix. Moreover, it is, to our knowledge, the first work taking social factors into accountin analysing the pre-prefix in Bantu in general.
