Kinyarwanda

About Kinyarwanda

Kinyarwanda is the national language of Rwanda and is spoken by almost everyone in the country, with about 12 million native speakers. It is official together with English, French and Swahili, and it is so close to Kirundi, the language of Burundi, that speakers of the two understand each other.

Kinyarwanda is a tonal Bantu language, but the tones are not marked in everyday writing. Hello is muraho and thank you is murakoze.

FamilyNiger-Congo, Bantu
Native speakersabout 12 million (2019)
Official inRwanda
ScriptLatin alphabet
Tonesyes, not marked in writing
Codesrw (ISO 639-1), kin (ISO 639-3)

Speaker numbers: Ethnologue (2019), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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