Languagle #8: Rundi
Bukebuke bushikana umusiba ku mugezi
"Little by little, a worm will get to the water source."
What it means
Keep going and you get there. A worm is about the slowest thing there is, but if it keeps moving it still reaches the water. The Rundi equivalent of 'slow and steady wins the race'.
How to say it
boo-keh-boo-keh boo-shee-kah-nah oo-moo-see-bah koo moo-geh-zee
Kirundi is tonal and uses long and short vowels, which everyday spelling doesn't show, so give each syllable roughly equal weight. Every vowel is said clearly, as in Spanish.
Where it was found
A traditional Kirundi proverb. The text comes from the ikirundi.org proverb collection, drawn from a Burundian school textbook.
Similar sayings
- Swahili: Haba na haba hujaza kibaba. Little by little fills the measure.
How to recognise Rundi
Kirundi is a Bantu language, and like its relatives it builds words from prefixes: umu- and aba- for people, iki- and ibi- for things, ubu- for qualities. It uses the plain Latin alphabet with no accents in everyday writing, and words tend to end in a vowel. Kirundi and Kinyarwanda, spoken next door in Rwanda, are close enough that telling them apart from a single line is hard even for linguists, so lean on the map clues.
About the Rundi language
Rundi, or Kirundi, is a Bantu language and the national language of Burundi, where almost the whole population speaks it. It is closely related to Kinyarwanda, spoken just to the north in Rwanda, and the two are largely mutually intelligible. Like most Bantu languages it sorts nouns into many classes marked by prefixes, and it is tonal. It is written in the Latin alphabet.
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