Kinyarwanda

Rwanda
Kinyarwanda
Native to	Rwanda, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Native speakers	9.8 million (2007)
Language family	Niger–Congo Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Southern Bantoid Bantu Northeast Bantu Great Lakes Bantu Rwanda-Rundi Rwanda
Writing system	Latin
Official status
Official language in	Rwanda
Language codes
ISO 639-1	rw
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	kiny1244
Guthrie code	JD.61
Linguasphere	99-AUS-df
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Kinyarwanda (Kinyarwanda: Ikinyarwanda, IPA: [iciɲɑɾɡwɑːndɑ]), also known as Rwanda (Ruanda) or Rwandan, or in Uganda as Fumbira, is the official language of Rwanda and a dialect of the Rwanda-Rundi language spoken by 12 million people in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and adjacent parts of southern Uganda. (The Kirundi dialect is the official language of neighboring Burundi.)

Kinyarwanda is one of the three official languages of Rwanda (along with English and French), and is spoken by almost all of the native population. This contrasts with most modern African states, whose borders were drawn by colonial powers and did not correspond to ethnic boundaries or pre-colonial kingdoms.

The table below gives the consonant set of Kinyarwanda.

The table below gives the vowel sounds of Kinyarwanda.

All five vowels occur in long and short forms. The distinction is phonemically distinctive. The quality of a vowel is not affected by its length.

Kinyarwanda is a tonal language. Like many Bantu languages, it has a two-way contrast between high and low tones (low-tone syllables may be analyzed as toneless). The realization of tones in Kinyarwanda is influenced by a complex set of phonological rules.

Except in a few morphological contexts, the sequences 'ki' and 'ke' may be pronounced interchangeably as [ki] and [ke] or [ci] and [ce] according to speaker's preference.