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51-514: 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. Neighbouring dialects of Kirundi are mutually intelligible with Ha , a language spoken in western Tanzania . Kirundi is one of the languages where Meeussen's rule , a rule describing a certain pattern of tonal change in Bantu languages,

102-511: A campaign of genocide was conducted against the Hutu population in 1972, and an estimated 100,000 Hutus died. In 1993, Burundi's first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye , who was Hutu, was believed to be assassinated by Tutsi officers, as was the person constitutionally entitled to succeed him. This sparked a counter-genocide in Burundi between Hutu political structures and

153-583: A civil war against Rwanda's Hutu government in 1990. A peace agreement was signed, but violence erupted again, culminating in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when Hutu extremists killed an estimated 800,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsis. About 30% of the Twa pygmy population of Rwanda were also killed by the Hutu extremists. At the same time, the Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of the country and

204-561: A gradual, natural split, as those who owned cattle became known as the Tutsi and those who did not own cattle became known as the Hutu. Mahmood Mamdani states that the Belgian colonial power designated people as Tutsi or Hutu on the basis of cattle ownership, physical measurements and church records. The debate over the ethnic origins of the Hutu and Tutsi within Rwandan politics predates

255-437: A huge group of languages spread throughout Western, Central and Southern Africa. The Benue–Congo branch includes the Bantu languages, which are found throughout Central, Southern, and Eastern Africa. A characteristic feature of most Atlantic–Congo languages, including almost all the Bantu languages except Swahili, Sotho-Tswana and Nguni languages, is their use of tone. They generally lack case inflection , but grammatical gender

306-564: A major new population center near the Great Lakes of East Africa, where a rich environment supported a dense population. The Urewe culture dominated the Great Lakes region between 650BC and 550BC. It was one of Africa's oldest iron-smelting centres. By the first century BC, Bantu speaking communities in the great lakes region developed iron forging techniques that enabled them to produce carbon steel . Movements by small groups to

357-454: A metrical or rhythmic structure. Some authors have expanded these more complex features of the tonal system noting that such properties are highly unusual for a tone system. Syllable structure in Rundi is considered to be CV, that is having no clusters, no coda consonants, and no complex vowel nuclei. It has been proposed that sequences that are CVV in the surface realization are actually CV in

408-475: A more complex intermixing could have taken place. Further east, Bantu-speaking communities had reached the great Central African rainforest, and by 500   BC, pioneering groups had emerged into the savannas to the south, in what are now the Democratic Republic of Congo , Angola , and Zambia . Another stream of migration, having moved east by 3,000 years ago (1000   BC), was creating

459-428: A shorter underclass, but with little relation to the gene pools that had existed a few centuries ago. The social categories are thus real, but there is little if any detectable genetic differentiation between Hutu and Tutsi. Tishkoff et al. (2009) found their mixed Hutu and Tutsi samples from Rwanda to be predominately of Bantu origin, with minor gene flow from Afro-Asiatic communities (17.7% Afro-Asiatic genes found in

510-401: A small portion of Hutu speak French , the other official language of Rwanda and Burundi, as a lingua franca , although the population is dwindling given the poor relations between Rwanda and France. The Belgian-sponsored Tutsi monarchy survived until 1959 when Kigeli V was exiled from the colony (then called Ruanda-Urundi ). In Burundi, Tutsis, who are the minority, maintained control of

561-404: A spectrum of physical variation in the peoples, Belgian authorities legally mandated ethnic affiliation in the 1920s, based on economic criteria. Formal and discrete social divisions were consequently imposed upon ambiguous biological distinctions. To some extent, the permeability of these categories in the intervening decades helped to reify the biological distinctions, generating a taller elite and

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612-536: Is phonemic . Rundi is a tonal language . There are two essential tones in Rundi: high and low (or H and L). Since Rundi has phonemic distinction on vowel length, when a long vowel changes from a low tone to a high tone it is marked as a rising tone. When a long vowel changes from a high tone to a low tone, it is marked as a falling tone. Rundi is often used in phonology to illustrate examples of Meeussen's rule In addition, it has been proposed that tones can shift by

663-490: Is active. In 2020, the Rundi Academy was established to help standardize and promote Kirundi. Although the literature on Rundi agrees on 5 vowels, the number of consonants can vary anywhere from 19 to 26 consonants. The table below is compiled from a survey of academic acceptance of Rundi consonants. The table below gives the vowel sounds of Rundi. All five vowels occur in long and short forms. The distinction

714-546: Is characteristic, with some languages having two dozen genders ( noun classes ). The root of the verb tends to remain unchanged, with either particles or auxiliary verbs expressing tenses and moods. For example, in a number of languages the infinitival is the auxiliary designating the future. Before the expansion of Bantu-speaking farmers, Central, Southern, and Southeast Africa were likely populated by Pygmy foragers, Khoisan -speaking hunter-gatherers , Nilo-Saharan -speaking herders, and Cushitic -speaking pastoralists . It

765-484: Is clear that there were human populations in the region at the time of the expansion, and pygmies are their closest living relatives. However, mtDNA genetic research from Cabinda suggests that only haplogroups that originated in West Africa are found there today, and the distinctive L 0 of the pre-Bantu population is missing, suggesting that there was a complete population replacement. In South Africa, however,

816-462: Is still the ruling party as of 2020 . Burundi is also currently governed by a former rebel group, the Hutu CNDD–FDD . As of 2006 , violence between the Hutu and Tutsi had subsided, but the situation in both Rwanda and Burundi was still tense, and tens of thousands of Rwandans were still living outside the country (see Great Lakes refugee crisis ). Bantu expansion The Bantu expansion

867-539: Is the largest of the three main population divisions in Burundi and Rwanda . Prior to 2017, the CIA World Factbook stated that 84% of Rwandans and 85% of Burundians are Hutu, with Tutsis being the second largest ethnic group at 15% and 14% of residents of Rwanda and Burundi, respectively. However, these figures were omitted in 2017 and no new figures have been published since then. The Twa pygmies ,

918-634: Is the remnant of an independent western Batwa ( Mbenga or "Baaka") language. Before the Bantu expansion, Khoisan -speaking peoples inhabited Southern Africa. Their descendants have largely mixed with other peoples and adopted other languages. A few still live by foraging, often supplemented by working for neighbouring farmers in the arid regions around the Kalahari desert, while a larger number of Nama continue their traditional subsistence by raising livestock in Namibia and adjacent South Africa. Prior to

969-426: Is thought that Central African Pygmies and Bantus branched out from a common ancestral population c. 70,000 years ago. Many Batwa groups speak Bantu languages; however, a considerable portion of their vocabulary is not Bantu in origin. Much of this vocabulary is botanical, deals with honey collecting, or is otherwise specialised for the forest and is shared between western Batwa groups. It has been proposed that this

1020-456: The Bantu languages are treated as synonymous with the geographic location of ceramic remnants; the popular approach of attempting to correlate linguistic reconstructions with archaeological data has resulted in propagation of the faulty presumption and circular reasoning that the earliest ceramic manufacturing in a given area is evidence for the earliest presence of Bantu-speakers . Within

1071-459: The Congo River system. The expansion reached South Africa, probably as early as AD 300. Bantuists believe that the Bantu expansion most probably began on the highlands between Cameroon and Nigeria . The 60,000-km Mambilla region straddling the borderlands here has been identified as containing remnants of "the Bantu who stayed home" as the bulk of Bantu-speakers moved away from

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1122-797: The Monomatapa kings built the Great Zimbabwe complex. The Swahili city-states were also established early in this period. These include sultanates based at Lamu , Mombasa , Kilwa , Pate and Malindi . The Swahili traded with the inland kingdoms, including Great Zimbabwe. Such processes of state-formation occurred with increasing frequency from the 16th century onward. They likely resulted from denser population, which led to more specialised divisions of labour, including military power, while making outmigration more effortful. Other factors promoting state-formation were increased trade among African communities and with European and Arab traders on

1173-577: The Rwandan genocide , and it continues to the present day, with the government of Rwanda no longer using the distinction. Modern-day genetic studies of the Y-chromosome suggest that the Hutu, like the Tutsi, are largely of Bantu extraction (83% E1b1a , 8% E2 ). Paternal genetic influences associated with the Horn of Africa and North Africa are few (3% E1b1b and 1% R1b ), and are ascribed to much earlier inhabitants who were assimilated. However,

1224-698: The 11th and 16th centuries, powerful Bantu-speaking states on a scale larger than local chiefdoms began to emerge. Notable early kingdoms include the Kingdom of the Kongo in present-day Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo , the Bunyoro Kitara Kingdom in the Great Lakes region, the Kingdom of Mapungubwe (c.1075–c.1220) in present-day South Africa , and the Zambezi River, where

1275-434: The Bantu expansion. Nilo-Saharan -speaking herder populations comprised a third group of the area's pre-Bantu expansion inhabitants. Linguistic, archeological and genetic evidence indicates that during the course of the Bantu expansion, "independent waves of migration of western African and East African Bantu-speakers into southern Africa occurred." In some places, genetic evidence suggests that Bantu language expansion

1326-502: The Central African rainforest is extremely spotty and consequently far from convincing so as to be taken as a reflection of a steady influx of Bantu speakers into the forest, let alone movement on a larger scale." Seidensticker (2024) indicates that the prevalent paradigm for the Bantu expansion has a forced connection between Central African ceramics and Central African languages , where the geographic location of speakers of

1377-624: The Hutu have considerably fewer Nilo-Saharan paternal lineages (4.3% B) than the Tutsi (14.9% B). In general, the Hutu appear to share a close genetic kinship with neighboring Bantu populations, particularly the Tutsi. However, it is unclear whether this similarity is primarily due to extensive genetic exchanges between these communities through intermarriage or whether it ultimately stems from common origins: [...] generations of gene flow obliterated whatever clear-cut physical distinctions may have once existed between these two Bantu peoples – renowned to be height, body build, and facial features. With

1428-539: The Mambilla region. Initially, archaeologists believed that they could find archaeological similarities in the region's ancient cultures that the Bantu-speakers were held to have traversed. Linguists, classifying the languages and creating a genealogical table of relationships, believed they could reconstruct material culture elements. They believed that the expansion was caused by the development of agriculture,

1479-663: The Tutsi military, in which an estimated 500,000 Burundians died. There were many mass killings of Tutsis and moderate Hutus; these events were deemed to be a genocide by the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi. While Tutsis remained in control of Burundi, the conflict resulted in genocide in Rwanda as well. A Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front , invaded Rwanda from Uganda, which started

1530-431: The Tutsi. The Tutsi were pastoralists and are believed to have established aristocratic control over the sedentary Hutu and Twa. Through intermarriage with the Hutu, the Tutsi were gradually assimilated, culturally, linguistically, and racially. Others suggest that the two groups are related but not identical, and they also suggest that the differences between them were exacerbated by Europeans, or they were exacerbated by

1581-641: The arrival of Bantus in Southeast Africa, Cushitic -speaking peoples had migrated into the region from the Ethiopian Highlands and other more northerly areas. The first waves consisted of Southern Cushitic speakers, who settled around Lake Turkana and parts of Tanzania beginning around 5,000 years ago. Many centuries later, around AD 1000, some Eastern Cushitic speakers also settled in northern and coastal Kenya . Khoisan -speaking hunter-gatherers also inhabited Southeast Africa before

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1632-577: The case in the Bantu language-speaking Lemba of Southern Africa . Where Bantu was adopted via language shift of existing populations, prior African languages were spoken, probably from African language families that are now lost, except as substrate influences of local Bantu languages (such as click sounds in local Bantu languages). It seems likely that the expansion of the Bantu-speaking people from their core region in West Africa began around 4000–3500   BC. Although early models posited that

1683-647: The coasts, technological innovations in economic activity, and new techniques in the political-spiritual ritualisation of royalty as the source of national strength and health. Other inland centres established during this phase of expansion include Bigo bya Mugenyi in Uganda , Thimlich Ohinga in Kenya and the Kweneng' Ruins in South Africa . Manfred K. H. Eggert stated that "the current archaeological record in

1734-982: The common ancestors of West African and Proto-Bantu peoples may have originated in the western region of the Sahara , amid the Kiffian period at Gobero , and may have migrated southward, from the Sahara into various parts of West Africa (e.g., Benin , Cameroon , Ghana , Nigeria , Togo ), as a result of desertification of the Green Sahara in 7000 BC. From Nigeria and Cameroon, agricultural Proto-Bantu peoples began to migrate , and amid migration, diverged into East Bantu peoples (e.g., Democratic Republic of Congo ) and West Bantu peoples (e.g., Congo, Gabon ) between 2500 BC and 1200 BC. He suggests that Igbo people and Yoruba people may have admixture from back-migrated Bantu peoples. The Atlantic-Congo family comprises

1785-611: The common cultural origin of their original speakers. The linguistic core of the Bantu languages, which comprise a branch of the Atlantic-Congo language family , was located in the southern regions of Cameroon . Genetic evidence also indicates that there was a large human migration from central Africa, with varying levels of admixture with local population. The expansion is believed to have taken place in at least two waves, between about 4,000 and 2,000 years ago (approximately 2,000 BC to AD 1). Linguistic analysis suggests that

1836-568: The communities already present at the coast. Between 300 AD-1000 AD, through participation in the long-existing Indian Ocean trade route , these communities established links with Arabian and Indian traders, leading to the development of the Swahili culture . Other pioneering groups had reached modern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa by AD 300 along the coast, and the modern Limpopo Province (formerly Northern Transvaal ) by AD 500. Between

1887-500: The continent and led to extensive admixture between migrants and local populations. A 2023 genetic study of 1,487 Bantu speakers sampled from 143 populations across 14 African countries revealed that the expansion occurred ~4,000 years ago in Western Africa. The results showed that Bantu speakers received significant gene-flow from local groups in regions they expanded into. Based on dental evidence, Irish (2016) concluded that

1938-414: The early speakers were both iron-using and agricultural, definitive archaeological evidence that they used iron does not appear until as late as 400   BC, though they were agricultural. The western branch, not necessarily linguistically distinct, according to Christopher Ehret , followed the coast and the major rivers of the Congo system southward, reaching central Angola by around 500   BC. It

1989-510: The expansion proceeded in two directions: the first went across or along the Northern border of the Congo forest region (towards East Africa), and the second – and possibly others – went south along Africa's Atlantic coast into what is now the Republic of the Congo , Gabon , Cameroon , Democratic Republic of the Congo , and Angola , or inland along the many south-to-north flowing rivers of

2040-475: The far south several centuries before Bantu-speaking migrants did. Archaeological , linguistic , genetic , and environmental evidence all support the conclusion that the Bantu expansion was a significant human migration. Generally, the movements of Bantu language-speaking peoples from the Cameroon/Nigeria border region throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa radically reshaped the genetic structure of

2091-722: The government and military. In Rwanda, the political power was transferred from the minority Tutsi to the majority Hutu. In Rwanda, this led to the "Social revolution" and Hutu and Tutsis conflicts. Tens of thousands of Tutsis were killed, and many others fled to neighboring countries, such as Burundi, Uganda , and forming the Banyamulenge Tutsi ethnic group in the South Kivu region of the Belgian Congo . Later, exiled Tutsis from Burundi invaded Rwanda, prompting Rwanda to close its border to Burundi. In Burundi ,

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2142-539: The making of ceramics, and the use of iron, which permitted new ecological zones to be exploited. In 1966, Roland Oliver published an article presenting these correlations as a reasonable hypothesis. The hypothesized Bantu expansion pushed out or assimilated the hunter-forager proto- Khoisan , who had formerly inhabited Southern Africa. In Eastern and Southern Africa , Bantu speakers may have adopted livestock husbandry from other unrelated Cushitic -and Nilotic -speaking peoples they encountered. Herding practices reached

2193-525: The mixed Hutu–Tutsi population). 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. Additionally,

2244-468: The region. Archaeological evidence from the separate works of Jean Hurault (1979, 1986 and 1988) and Rigobert Tueché (2000) in the region indicates cultural continuity from 3000 BC until today. The majority of the groups of the Bamenda highlands (occupied for 2000 years until today), somewhat south and contiguous with the Mambilla region, have an ancient history of descent from the north in the direction of

2295-490: The smallest of the two countries' principal populations, share language and culture with the Hutu and Tutsi. They are distinguished by a considerably shorter stature. The Hutu are believed to have first emigrated to the Great Lake region from Central Africa in the great Bantu expansion . Various theories have emerged to explain the purported physical differences between them and their fellow Bantu -speaking neighbors,

2346-543: The southeast from the Great Lakes region were more rapid, with initial settlements widely dispersed near the coast and near rivers, due to comparatively difficult farming conditions in areas farther from water. Archaeological findings have shown that by 100 BC to 300 AD, Bantu speaking communities were present at the coastal areas of Misasa in Tanzania and Kwale in Kenya. These communities also integrated and intermarried with

2397-425: The underlying deep structure , with the consonant coalescing with the first vowel. Rundi has been shown to have properties of consonant harmony particularly when it comes to sibilants. Meeussen described this harmony in his essay and it is investigated further by others. One example of this harmony is triggered by /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ and targets the set of /s/ and /z/ in preceding adjacent stem syllables. Kirundi

2448-569: Was a major series of migrations of the original Proto-Bantu -speaking group , which spread from an original nucleus around West - Central Africa . In the process, the Proto-Bantu-speaking settlers displaced, eliminated or absorbed pre-existing hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups that they encountered. There is linguistic evidence for this expansion – a great many of the languages which are spoken across sub-Equatorial Africa are remarkably similar to each other, suggesting

2499-760: Was adopted as the official language of instruction in Burundian primary schools. Hutu The Hutu ( / ˈ h uː t uː / ), also known as the Abahutu , are a Bantu ethnic group which is native to the African Great Lakes region. They mainly live in Rwanda , Burundi , and Uganda where they form one of the principal ethnic groups alongside the Tutsi and the Great Lakes Twa . The Hutu

2550-586: Was largely a result of substantial population replacement. In other places, Bantu language expansion, like many other languages, has been documented with population genetic evidence to have occurred by means other than complete or predominant population replacement (e.g. via language shift and admixture of incoming and existing populations). For example, one study found this to be the case in Bantu language speakers who are African Pygmies or are in Mozambique , while another population genetic study found this to be

2601-593: Was recognized an official language in Burundi by the 1962 Constitution of the Kingdom of Burundi . In accordance with the constitution, many Burundian government orders, especially those printed in the Bulletin Officiel du Burundi from 1962 to 1963, were written in both French and Kirundi. After the constitution was suspended in 1966, Kirundi remained a de facto official language in the country, though its use in government documents declined. In 1972 Kirundi

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