Kinyarwanda and Kirundi
On Colonial Divisions, Discourses of National Belonging, and Language Boundaries
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18965207 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nico Nassenstein (0000-0001-9530-2949, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 11-40 |
| Publication date | 2019-07-08 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modern Africa Politics History and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2336-3274 • E-ISSN: 2570-7558 |
| Publisher | University of Hradec Kralove (PUBLISHER • CZ) |
| DOI | 10.26806/modafr.v7i1.264 |
| OpenAlex | W2964015429 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 5 |
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
Bantu languages · Colonial rule · Colonialism · German · Linguistics · Political science · Sociology · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |