- Official language in
- Rwanda
- Also spoken in
- Congo - Kinshasa, Uganda
- Script
- Latin
Where it's spoken
Kinyarwanda is Rwanda's national language, and the constitution names Ikinyarwanda, English, and French as the country's official languages. Rwanda's government describes Kinyarwanda as the common language spoken in every part of the country, and now also names Kiswahili among the country's official languages. Outside Rwanda, Kinyarwanda is also spoken in Congo - Kinshasa and Uganda.
Sources
- Constitute Project — "Rwanda 2003 (rev. 2015) Constitution" (English translation) — Article 8 (national and official languages)
- Republic of Rwanda — Government of Rwanda official portal, "About" page — "People & Culture" section
- Omniglot — "Kinyarwanda" (writing systems and languages) — Countries where spoken
Script & pronunciation
Kinyarwanda is written in the Latin alphabet. It is a tonal language, but the tones are not usually shown in writing. A standardized spelling system has been in use since around the middle of the twentieth century, though the spelling systems used by Roman Catholic and Protestant missions differed somewhat. This app's phrase cards give the Kinyarwanda text in the Latin alphabet, and when a card also has a romanization field, it is generally the same text divided into hyphenated syllables rather than a separate phonetic script, as in Muraho ("hello"), whose romanization is Mu-ra-ho — many cards do not include this field.
Sources
- Omniglot — "Kinyarwanda" (writing systems and languages) — Alphabet, tone marking, and spelling history
Grammar essentials
Kinyarwanda's basic word order is subject–verb–object: this app's own cards describe it this way. An academic study of Kinyarwanda verbs illustrates the same order with a glossed sentence meaning "the man is sharpening the knife," where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object last. Kinyarwanda nouns belong to numbered noun classes, each marked by a prefix; the same study's glossed examples show a verb's subject-agreement prefix carrying the same class number as its subject noun, as with the class-7 noun for "knife" and a verb marked with a matching class-7 subject prefix. This app's cards mark this agreement where it matters for a phrase: in Imizigo yanjye ntiyageze ("My luggage hasn't arrived"), the cards note that imizigo ("luggage") belongs to noun class 4, and that the verb's negative subject prefix agrees with that class. Negation is marked with a prefix on the verb rather than a separate word: the first-person-singular negative prefix is si-, as in Simvuga Ikinyarwanda ("I can't speak Kinyarwanda"). Questions are not marked by any change in word order; this app's cards note that a statement such as Ufite imiti? ("Do you have medicine?") becomes a question through intonation alone.
Sources
- Jerro, Kyle (2017). "Change of state in Kinyarwanda: A study in root meaning." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 2, article 25 — pp.1-3, examples (4) and (7): word order and noun class agreement