Kinyarwanda and Kirundi: On Colonial Divisions, Discourses of National Belonging, and Language Boundaries
Main Article Content
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.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors’ Certification
Basic instructions and copyright notice
Full Publication ethics and malpractice statement of the journal Modern Africa could be found here.
In submitting the manuscript to Modern Africa, the authors certify that:
- They are authorised by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
- The submitted manuscript is original and has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, thesis or working paper), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication has been approved by all the authors and that the authors have full authority to enter into this agreement.
- They warrant and represent that they have the full power and authority to enter into and execute this agreement and to convey the rights granted herein, and that such rights are not now subject to prior assignment, transfer or other encumbrance. This also applies to the text and photo originals attained from other sources (for which the authors have secured the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere).
- Their manuscript contains nothing that is unlawful, libellous, or which would, if published, constitute a breach of contract or of confidence or of commitment given to secrecy.
- In the event that the parties to this agreement, either individually or collectively, are held responsible for damages or the costs of a legal process undertaken by a third party as a result of the authors’ actions under points 1, 2, 3, and 4, the authors agree to release the publisher from the claims of the third party and to compensate the publisher for any resulting legal costs.
- Plagiarism is regarded as a serious offence and leads to the rejection of a manuscript.
- Any violation of the above-mentioned rules leads to the rejection of a manuscript.
- They agree to the following license and copyright agreement:
Copyright Agreement
Authors who publish in the journal Modern Africa agree to the following terms:
- The journal is no-fee open access journal. That means all content is free and without charges available at journal webpages. Also, authors are not charged for having their papers published in the journal.
- Authors retain the copyright but grant the journal right of first publication in print and online to the journal Modern Africa. The work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike, which allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. The license is valid for both electronic and paper copies.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), provided they add an explicit acknowledgement of its initial publication in the journal Modern Africa.
- Authors grant Modern Africa commercial rights to produce hardcopy volumes of the journal for sale to libraries and individuals, as well as to integrate the work, its title, and its abstract in databases, abstracting and indexing services, and other similar information sources.
- Court of jurisdiction is Hradec Králové, Czech Republic.