Learn Kirundi Through Topics You Actually Care About

LingoBear creates short Kirundi passages on topics you choose. Tap any word for an instant English translation and build your vocabulary as you read. Bantu language, sole national language of Burundi alongside French, Latin script, 16 noun classes, tonal, mutually intelligible with Kinyarwanda, ~12M speakers.

Tap any word for instant translation

Every word in your Kirundi reading passage is clickable. Get English translations and grammar help — useful for parsing Bantu noun-class agreement.

Read about topics you choose

Type any topic and LingoBear generates a fresh Kirundi reading passage — from Lake Tanganyika fishing to royal drum heritage.

What is Kirundi and how is it related to Kinyarwanda?

Kirundi (Ikirundi) is a Bantu language native to Burundi, where it is a national language alongside French and English. About 12 million people speak it, including communities in eastern DRC, southwestern Uganda and Tanzania. Together with Kinyarwanda (spoken in Rwanda) it forms the Rwanda-Rundi dialect cluster; the two are mutually intelligible despite being standardised separately.

What grammar features does Kirundi have?

Kirundi uses 16 active noun classes whose prefixes drive agreement throughout the sentence. Verbs are agglutinative, stacking subject, object, tense, aspect and mood markers in a fixed order. The language is tonal with two contrastive levels (high and low) that can encode both lexical and grammatical contrasts. LingoBear lets you see these in real text.