Place of Kinyarwanda Language in Banks in Rwanda: A Case of Equity Bank Rwanda
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53819/81018102t50117Abstract
The study aimed to determine how languages cohabitate in the Equity Bank Rwanda bilingual community. The study focused on secondary and primary data collection and analysis. The data was collected from a small group of Equity Bank customers and service providers who represented other beneficiaries of banks operating in Rwanda. A simple random sampling technique was used to get the sample size. The researcher collected primary data using questionnaires. The results showed that ninety point three percent (90.3%) of Equity documents were written in English. Only Nine point seven percent (9.7%) of the Equity bank Rwanda official documents appear to be written in Kinyarwanda. French and Swahili seem to be out of use. Assessing the perception of the beneficiaries of Equity Bank Rwanda on the services provided in foreign languages, it was found that only 13.9% of Equity Bank Rwanda customers are happy with the services provided by this Bank in its preferred language (English), while 63.4% of them were dissatisfied with the fact that most services were in English. The study recommends that the bank should comply with the Law no 017/2021 of 03/03/2021 relating to financial service consumer protection stipulates, in Article 9, that a financial service consumer contract, a disclosure document or any other document to be issued to the financial service consumer as prescribed by this Law or regulation, must be written in one of Rwanda’s official languages as chosen by the financial service consumer. The government should follow up the implementation of the Law, in its articles 9 and 13. Kinyarwanda terminologies should create for banks to serve their customers in a language they are comfortable with.
Keywords: Kinyarwanda Language, Cohabitation of languages, bilingual community, Equity Bank, Rwanda
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