Archaisms of Kinyarwaanda: a sociolinguistic study

Abstract

This is a socio-historical study of the Kinyarwaanda language. On the basis of the method of internal reconstruction and the method of the Principal Components Analysis (PCA), the study analyses linguistic variations that occurred in the parent language of the Kinyarwaanda language and whose result is contemporary Kinyarwaanda. Those variations or changes occurred on three levels: the phonological level, the morphosynactic level and the lexico-semantic level.