A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree "Licencié en pédagogie Appliquée, Agrégé de l'enseignement secondaire en anglais"

Résumé,

The present study entitled : "A Pragmatic Analysis of Some Kirundi Proverbs Devaluing women in society" aims to explore and analyze Kirundi proverbs from a pragmatic perspective in the context of the Burundian sociolinguistics.

The following hypotheses were formulated at the beginning of the study : "The literal meaning of proverbs devaluing women is different from the implied meaning. The pragmatic inference is relevant to the context of use." The data for the study were sourced and collected from competent Kirundi native speakers. Therefore, a recorded interview instrument was conducted on ten sampled informants : five females and five males aged 30 and above in Bugendana commune of Gitega province.

Data were then collected, qualitatively and quantitatively presented, analyzed and interpreted to fulfill the study.
The interpretation of the data helped us develop five themes in which we revealed how a woman is neglected in Burundian society.
They play a neglected role in politics, Churches matters, in Economy and are sometimes taken as sexual toys.

We discovered that proverbs devaluing women embody figures of speech which discourage a woman from claiming for her better place in the society.

This negatively impacts on the addressee/hearer since it sounds as if it was legitimated by the society. The study ends with recommendations to men and women , to the Ministry of Culture and that of Human Rights and Gender to stop discriminating women on basis of these proverbs, to ban them and teach the young generation the new social values.