Discovering Burundi's Cultural History Through Language
Ellen Eggers CSU-Chico

How does one go about characterizing an entire country, past and present? Especially one that seems to include hundreds of years of one warring faction against another, one “ethnic cleansing” after another, one military coup after one political one. That was my task when committing to writing the Historical Dictionary of Burundi, the small, less-known sister to the now infamous Rwanda. The country’s Byzantine political system continually changes, and its royal dynasties would fit well in a Shakespearean tragedy. What’s the answer to making sense of all of this? Language, of course. I will discuss how the project unfolded as I discovered linguistic connections, which themselves helped to tell the long, sad story of a country and people divided by ethnic divisions and colonial intervention.