A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree "Licence en Langue et Littérature Anglaises".

Résumé,

In this study of the influence of Giha on the Kirundi spoken in Gisagara commune, our basic concern was toshow to what extent Giha has influenced the Kirundi spoken in Gisagara borderland. As a matter of fact, the geographical location of Gisagara commune has its own linguistic peculiarities and this made me very interested in investigating the speech variety of the area.
Furthermore, with regards to these linguistic peculiarities, I was curious about the linguistic behaviour of people living in the locality to see if there is any forign linguistic influence. The findings revealed that the Kirundi spoken in our research area is influenced, either phonologically or lexically since we find some Giha lexical items which are present in the variety of the Kirundi spoken in the locality.

Besides, some social expressions also show that Giha influences Kirundi as Gisagara people use them while interacting.

The research questions that guded this work at checking whether Giha has any linguistic influence on the variety of Kirundi spolen in Gisagara border area. In few words, I can say that the dialect of Kirundi spoken in my research area is a mixture of Kirundi and Giha words, which makes it different from the standard Kirundi.
The work is divided in five chapters namely the General Introduction ; Literature Review ; Methodology ; Data Presentation, Analysis and Findings and finally General Conclusion and recommendations.