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Kinyarwanda, [3] Rwandan or Rwanda, officially known as Ikinyarwanda, [4] is a Bantu language and the national language of Rwanda. [5] It is a dialect of the Rwanda-Rundi language that is also spoken in adjacent parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Uganda , where the dialect is known as ikinyakore,Rufumbira,or Urufumbira .
A Rwandan historian, Antoine Mugesera, stated that French is still used among the educated, but Kinyarwanda is used for matters relating to simple topics and messages. [6] English is now considered as the primary language among other foreign languages. Swahili is used by some people, in commerce, and is taught as a subject in schools. [7]
Kirundi is mutually intelligible with Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda, and the two form parts of the wider dialect continuum known as Rwanda-Rundi. [3] Kirundi is natively spoken by the Hutu, including Bakiga and other related ethnicities, as well as Tutsi, Twa and Hima among others have adopted the language.
Tutsi were considered by some to be of Cushitic origin, although they do not speak a Cushitic language, and have lived in the areas where they presently inhabit for at least 400 years, leading to considerable intermarriage with the Hutu in the area. Due to the history of intermingling and intermarrying of Hutu and Tutsi, some ethnographers and ...
With more than 10 million Kinyarwanda speakers, [87] and around 20 million for Rwanda-Rundi as a whole, [87] it is one of the largest of the Bantu languages. [88] The language was likely to have been introduced to the area from Cameroon during the Bantu expansion, although the timescale and nature of this migration is not known conclusively. [89]
Rwanda-Rundi or West Highlands Kivu is a group of Bantu languages, specifically a dialect continuum, spoken in Central Africa.Two dialects, Kirundi and Kinyarwanda, have been standardized as the national languages of Burundi and Rwanda respectively.
Inhabitants of Rwanda's Nkombo Island speak Mashi, a language closely related to Kinyarwanda. [ 300 ] French was spoken by slightly under 6% of the population according to the 2012 census and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie . [ 301 ]
Hutus speak Rwanda-Rundi as their native tongue, which is a member of the Bantu subgroup of the Niger–Congo language family. Rwanda-Rundi is subdivided into the Kinyarwanda and Kirundi dialects, which have been standardized as official languages of Rwanda and Burundi, respectively. It is also spoken as a mother tongue by the Tutsi and Twa.