- Official language in
- Burundi
- Script
- Latin
Where it's spoken
Burundi's constitution says that the national language is Kirundi and that the official languages are Kirundi and all other languages as determined by law. A scholarly study of Kirundi describes it as a Bantu language spoken in Burundi, where it has the status of national and official language, and says that the country's second official language is French.
The same study says that Kirundi is mutually intelligible with a number of neighbouring languages, most importantly Kinyarwanda.
Sources
Script & pronunciation
Kirundi is written with Latin letters. The Kirundi-English dictionary by Cox, in the revised edition published on the Matana website, marks a long vowel with a bar over the vowel. The Matana website's quick guide tells learners to distinguish Kirundi vowels with long or high tones, and gives guhana and guhāna as its example.
An academic chapter on Kirundi says that it follows the Kirundi orthography of Ntahokaja, and that its tone marking follows a tradition started by Meeussen and does not necessarily represent surface tones.
This app's Kirundi cards give the text in plain Latin letters, with no bar over vowels, no tone marks and no separate romanization field, as in Murakoze cane ("Thank you very much").
The orthography rules drawn up by an orthography committee of the Alliance, hosted on the Matana website, say that na is written with an apostrophe and no space when a vowel follows, as in N'abandi, and that the possessive particle elides. The app's card for "I want to walk around the city" writes n'amaguru in this way, and its card for "I want to walk along the lake shore" writes y'ikiyaga.
Sources
- Nshemezimana, E. & van der Wal, J. (2025). The expression of information structure in Kirundi. In The expression of information structure in Bantu, pp. 271-334. Language Science Press — Section 1 (introduction)
- Matana: Kirundi dictionary and study course (online) — Home page, quick guide
- Cox, Elizabeth E. (1969). Dictionary Kirundi-English / English-Kirundi, revised and augmented edition (Philipps, 2023), with the Alliance orthography rules — Front matter (symbols) and orthography rules 1a and 1g
Grammar essentials
The academic chapter on Kirundi says that, as in other Bantu languages, there is a ban on focus in a preverbal position, and it shows this for content question words. Its example of the question "What did you see?" therefore puts the question word after the verb.
The same chapter describes ni as an invariant copula whose negative counterpart is si. This app's cards for "What?" and "How much is it?" both begin with ni, as in Ni angahe?
In the chapter's example replies, the word for "yes" is ego and the word for "no" is oya. This app's cards for "Yes" and "No" are Ego and Oya.
The Matana dictionary shows Kirundi nouns with their class and plural prefix.
Sources
- Nshemezimana, E. & van der Wal, J. (2025). The expression of information structure in Kirundi. In The expression of information structure in Bantu, pp. 271-334. Language Science Press — Section 3.1 (example 18), section 6.1 (copula), example 9 (yes/no)
- Matana: Kirundi dictionary and study course (online) — Home page, quick guide