Kinyarwanda and Kirundi: On Colonial Divisions, Discourses of National Belonging, and Language Boundaries
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: The development of the Bantu languages Kinyarwanda and Kirundi is entangled within the colonial histories of Rwanda and Burundi, first under German and then Belgian rule. From the turn of the twentieth century on, missionaries compiled grammars and dictionaries of the two mutually intelligible languages, contributing to the development and instrumentalisation of two prestigious varieties out of a larger dialect continuum. In this contribution, I trace the missionary and colonial activities of corpus planning and textualisation and summarise how Kinyarwanda and Kirundi turned into official languages with distinct linguistic boundaries. The central research question is how speakers of Kinyarwanda and Kirundi thereafter came to be identified as “Rwandans” or as “Burundians,” with each language indexing a specific national categorisation. Tentatively, I contrast these developments with contemporary fluid practices in multilingual neighbourhoods.
Author: Nico Nassenstein
Institution: Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2964015429