A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree"Licence en langue et littérature anglaises"

RESUME,

This work deals with the sociolinguistic study of the jargon skopen by Burundi University Students. The aim is to collect works and expressions and analyze them from a sociolinguistic angle, and account for their importance on everyday interactions between those students. Everyone needs to co-operate with others through commmunication. There are different ways in which people use language since the language depends on the situation. Language is created within the community with the purpose of avoiding the secret to be discovered by outsides. As the students un Mutanga campus constitite a social group, there are some words used by them that people who do not belong to their group cannot understand. Even on campus stedents and off campus stedents do not communicate alike.

To be successful, in my work, I chose informants who could give much information about words and expressions used by those on campus students on one side and off campus students on another side. To collect data properly, questionnaires, observation and face to face conversation were used. As results, I came up with one hundred words and expressions which originate from Kirundi, French, English and Kiswahili.Those words are categorized depending on what they related to. Words and expressions used by those students are transferred in the special language by using some linguistic mechanisms such as reduplication, coinage, acronym, blending. They are also transferred with some semantic change like meaning which wonsists of synonymy, antonymy and polysemy and style which consists of metaphor, hyperbole, metonymy, antithesis, irony and euphemism. This work shows that jargon is self-contained and good tool as means of communication if its speakers use it in an appripriate context.