Rwanda

Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda, is a Bantu language of the Rwanda-Rundi dialect continuum, spoken also in adjoining parts of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. It is fully mutually intelligible with Kirundi, the national language of Burundi.

Its speakers include the Tutsi, the Hutu and the hunter-gatherer Twa: Hutu farmers settled the hills around the year 1000, cattle-raising Tutsi moved in from the 1400s, and the centralised Rwandan kingdom grew up around the Gasabo hill between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. As the court expanded, Kinyarwanda spread with it, carrying royal oral traditions and historical poems recited from memory, since the language had no standard orthography before the colonial era.