A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for tha award of the degree licence en langue et littérature Anglaises

Résumé,

Linguists interested in the domain of dialectology assume that no language is immune from change. It was on that perspective that I conducted a study on the lexical influence of Giha on Kirundi spoken in Kayogoro commune.
The research aims at showing how Giha influences Kirundi at the lexical level. Two questions were raised. The area of investigation (Kayogoro commune) was large. In order to be able to handle such a wide area, the researcher decided to consider the zones.

The Kayogoro Commune has five zones (administrative zones). In each zone, I sometimes selected the hills depending on how many hills are in each zone. The researcher used simple random sampling techniques. As far as a selection of informants was concerned, five females and five males were chosen on each hill. The researcher used a simple random sampling in order to be able to get the informants among a huge number of the population of Kayogoro commune. A questionnaire for interview was used in data collection as instrument. As the finding reveal it, people from kayogoro borrow a number of Giha words and bring them into Kirundi spoken there. While borrowing words from Giha, there are linguistic mechanisms used by Kayogoro people-deletion, tone shift, reduplication and others to approximate the Giha language. Recommendations have been directed to different people. For example, to the dialect dictionary compilers, they should be careful because there are words which are not mere regional but borrowings from foreign languages neighbouring the regions where they are spoken.