Swahili in Burundi looks back upon a long history: first having been intro- duced by the German colonial administration, it has turned into a trade language along both the naval and non-naval trade routes between Uvira (DR Congo), Kigoma (Tanzania) and Bujumbura. The variety of Kiswahili spoken in Bujumbura (Burundi) is central to the present sociolinguistic and structural analysis. Drawing from morphosyntactic cliticisation approach, the paper also examines the syntax of Kiswahili contractions. It looks into how Kiswahili speakers decide on choosing the appropriate combinatorial partners to form an appropriate and permissible contraction. This paper examines the behaviour of Kiswahili possessives in combining with nouns to form contractions. Paradoxically, though, they behave syntactically like a group of clitics, created from two distinct constituents. These attachments exhibit behaviour that implies that they are joined to the preceding or succeeding form in the lexicon, as affixes do (e.g.-yo from yako 'your/yours' is joined to baba 'father' to form babayo 'your father'). Most contractions are attached to host words to form permissible combinations. Kiswahili contractions may be formed in various ways with a free-standing content word, a number figure or different word combinations with varying reducing degrees, sometimes becoming monosyllabic, with only a vowel or vowel-consonant combination.
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