Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of requirements for the award of the degree"Licence en Pédagogie Appliquée, Agrégé de l'enseignement secondaire en Anglais"

RESUME,

This is a sociolinguistic study of pupils and staff members' nickunames in selected secondary schools in Bujumbura Municipality and Mwaro Province.It aims at investigating on the social factors that influence the choice of the nicknames.It also aims at exploring the linguistic patterns and processes that are in involved in the nicknaming practice.
Moreover,it goes further by analyzing how gender and environment may affect the nickname practice.After analysis,it was found that nicknaming embed a good deal of a linguistic phenomenon such as stylistic devices.These include methonymy,hyperbole,comparison,oxymoron,and euphemism.The study was conducted on a sample of 207 informants from the selected secondary schools using interview,focus Group Discussions and written questionnaire.The analysis and interpretation of the data revealed that pupils from the selected secondary schools take into account enormous factors when choosing nicknames .
For instance,they take into account physical appearance,origin,garments,hobby,attitude,generosity,habit in speaking,alcohol and drugs conception,greed,intelligence,stubbornness,etc.Furthermore,the results from the data collected showed that environment and gender affect the nickname practice.Given the corpus that this study produced,it was noticed that male nicknaming is more predominant that the female one.In addition,pupils from rural environment practise nicknaming more than those from urban one.Respective of this,it was concluded that nicknaming,in selected schools,is both a social and a linguistic phenomenon for it allows pupils to communicate with one another,express their feelings,show their fellows pupils to communicate with one another,express their feelings,show their fellows' character,express their experience and convey messages to one another.