A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Award of the Degee "Licence en langue et littérature Anglaises".

RÉSUME,

Focusing on the sociolect spoken by fishermen at Kajaga fishing Port with special emphasis on the semantic aspect, this study to investigate whether this target population constitute a linguistic community. It also attemp*ts to explore the reasons why this created code is not intelligible except among the users. Moreover this provides the words and expressions on which this language variety lays/ To achiev ethis goal, the yardstick was that of knowing if fishermen constitute a linguistic community, the motivation of creating this code and, the linguistic features on which this language variety lays. Whith reference to the randomù sampling technique, fifty informants were taken as sample among the population of five hundred fishermen; Be it, one tenth of the target population. Then, the analysis of the data revealed that eighty-five word and expressions are used peculiarly within this sociolect. Moreover, most those linguistic patterns are borrowed from Kirundi, kiswahili, French and English whereas some others derived from the coinage process. Hitherto, the presence of synonymy and figures of speech was also detected within this code.Finally, several reasons such as secrecy motivated the creation of this communicative system through which the fishermen communicate.