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Swahili
Kiswahili
Pronunciation	Template:IPA-sw
Native to	Tanzania, Kenya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bajuni Islands (part of Somalia), Mozambique (mostly Mwani), Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Comoros, Mayotte, Zambia, Malawi, and Madagascar
Native speakers	Estimates range from 2 million (2003) to 150 million (2012) L2 speakers: 90 million (1991–2015)
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Volta-Congo Benue–Congo Bantoid Southern Bantoid Bantu Northeast Bantu Northeast Coast Bantu Sabaki Swahili
Writing system	Latin script (Roman Swahili alphabet) Arabic script (Arabic Swahili alphabet) Swahili Braille
Official status
Official language in	5 countries Kenya Tanzania DR Congo Rwanda Uganda Organizations African Union East African Community Southern African Development Community
Recognised minority language in	Mozambique Burundi
Regulated by	Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (Tanzania) Chama cha Kiswahili cha Taifa (Kenya)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	sw
ISO 639-2	swa
ISO 639-3	swa – inclusive code Individual codes: swc – Congo Swahili swh – Coastal Swahili ymk – Makwe wmw – Mwani
Glottolog	swah1254
Guthrie code	G.42–43; G.40.A–H (pidgins & creoles)
Linguasphere	99-AUS-m
areas where Swahili or Comorian is the indigenous language   official or national language   as a trade language
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Swahili, also known by its native name Kiswahili, is a Bantu language and the first language of the Swahili people. It is a lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of East and Southern Africa, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, some parts of Malawi, Somalia, Zambia, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Comorian, spoken in the Comoros Islands, is sometimes considered a dialect of Swahili, although other authorities consider it a distinct language.

The exact number of Swahili speakers, be they native or second-language speakers, is unknown and a matter of debate. Various estimates have been put forward, which vary widely, ranging from 100 million to 150 million. Swahili serves as a national language of the DRC, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Shikomor, an official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is related to Swahili. Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and officially recognised as a lingua francacode: lat promoted to code: la of the East African Community. In 2018, South Africa legalized the teaching of Swahili in South African schools as an optional subject to begin in 2020.

A significant fraction of Swahili vocabulary derives from Arabic, in part conveyed by Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants. For example, the Swahili word for "book" is kitabu, traceable back to the Arabic word كتاب kitāb (from the root K-T-B "write"). However, the Swahili plural form of this word ("books") is vitabu, rather than the Arabic plural form كتب kutub, following the Bantu grammar in which ki- is reanalysed as a nominal class prefix, whose plural is vi-.

Classification

Swahili is a Bantu language of the Sabaki branch. In Guthrie's geographic classification, Swahili is in Bantu zone G, whereas the other Sabaki languages are in zone E70, commonly under the name Nyika. Local folk-theories of the language have often considered Swahili to be a mixed language because of its many loanwords from Arabic and Persian, and the fact that the Swahili language emerged as a result of trade between the east African coastal Bantu-speaking tribes and traders from Arabia, Persia, Asia (south and southeast) as well as Europe (Portugal). However, historical linguists do not consider the Arabic influence on Swahili to be significant enough to classify it as a mixed language, since Arabic influence is limited to lexical items, most of which have only been borrowed after 1500, while the grammatical and syntactic structure of the language is typically Bantu.

History

Origin

The Swahili language is made of many Arabic words and Bantu words. It dates its origin to the Bantu people of the coast of East Africa. It is a daughter language of the Pokomo language, which is also known as Kingozi. Most of the Bantu Swahili vocabulary is derived primarily from the Pokomo, Taita and Mijikenda languages and secondarily from other East African Bantu languages. Approximately 30% of the Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, Portuguese, and Malay with Arabic contributing a majority of the foreign loan words in the Swahili language. It was originally written in Arabic script.

The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa in 1711 in the Arabic script that were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. The original letters are preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India.

Its name comes from Arabic: سَاحِل sāħil = "coast", broken plural سَوَاحِل sawāħil = "coasts", سَوَاحِلِىّ sawāħilï = "of coasts".

Colonial period

Various colonial powers that ruled on the coast of East Africa played a role in the growth and spread of Swahili. With the arrival of the Arabs in East Africa, they used Swahili as a language of trade as well as for teaching Islam to the local Bantu peoples. This resulted in Swahili first being written in the Arabic alphabet. The later contact with the Portuguese resulted in the increase of vocabulary of the Swahili language. The language was formalised in an institutional level when the Germans took over after the Berlin conference. After seeing there was already a widespread language, the Germans formalised it as the official language to be used in schools. Thus schools in Swahili are called Shule (from German Schulecode: deu promoted to code: de ) in government, trade and the court system. With the Germans controlling the major Swahili-speaking region in East Africa, they changed the alphabet system from Arabic to Latin. After the first World war, Britain took over East Africa, where they found Swahili rooted in most areas, not just the coastal regions. The British decided to formalise it as the language to be used across the East African region (although in British East Africa most areas used English and various Nilotic and other Bantu languages while Swahili was mostly restricted to the coast). In June 1928, an inter-territorial conference attended by representatives of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar took place in Mombasa. The Zanzibar dialect was chosen as standard Swahili for those areas, and the standard orthography for Swahili was adopted.

Current status

Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three African Great Lakes countries (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), where it is an official or national language, while being the first language to many people in Tanzania especially in the coastal regions of Tanga, Pwani, Dar es salaam, Mtwara and Lindi. In the inner regions of Tanzania, Swahili is spoken with an accent influenced by local languages and dialects, and as a first language for most people born in the cities, whilst being spoken as a second language in rural areas. Swahili and closely related languages are spoken by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Comoros, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia and Rwanda. The language was still understood in the southern ports of the Red Sea in the 20th century. Swahili speakers may number 120 to 150 million in total.

Swahili is among the first languages in Africa for which language technology applications have been developed. Arvi Hurskainen is one of the early developers. The applications include a spelling checker, part-of-speech tagging, a language learning software, an analysed Swahili text corpus of 25 million words, an electronic dictionary, and machine translation between Swahili and English. The development of language technology also strengthens the position of Swahili as a modern medium of communication.

Tanzania

The widespread use of Swahili as a nation language in Tanzania came after Tanganyika got her independence in 1961 and the government decided that it would be used as a language to unify the new nation. That saw the use of Swahili in all levels of government, trade, art as well as schools in which primary school children are taught in Swahili, before switching to English in Secondary schools (although Swahili is still taught as an independent subject). In 1985, with the 8–4–4 system of education, Swahili was made a compulsory subject in all Kenyan schools.

After Tanganyika and Zanzibar unification in 1964, Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili (TUKI, Institute of Swahili Research) was created from the Interterritorial Language Committee. In 1970 TUKI was merged with the University of Dar es salaam, while Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (BAKITA) was formed. BAKITA is an organisation dedicated to the development and advocacy of Swahili as a means of national integration in Tanzania. Key activities mandated for the organization include creating a healthy atmosphere for the development of Swahili, encouraging use of the language in government and business functions, coordinating activities of other organizations involved with Swahili, standardizing the language. Although other bodies and agencies can propose new vocabularies, BAKITA is the only organisation that can approve its usage in the Swahili language.

Kenya

In Kenya, Chama cha Kiswahili cha Taifa (CHAKITA) was established in 1998 to research and propose means by which Kiswahili can be integrated to a national language.

Religious and political identity

Religion

Islam

Swahili played a major role in spreading both Christianity and Islam in East Africa. From their arrival in East Africa, Arabs brought Islam and set up Madrasas, where they used Swahili to teach Islam to the natives. As the Arab presence grew, more and more natives were converted to Islam and were taught using the Swahili language.

Christianity

From the arrival of Europeans in East Africa, Christianity was introduced in East Africa. While the Arabs were mostly based in the coastal areas, European missionaries went further inland spreading Christianity. But since the first missionary posts in East Africa were in the coastal areas, missionaries picked up Swahili and used it to spread Christianity since it had a lot of similarities with many of the other indigenous languages in the region.

Politics

During the struggle for Tanganyika independence, the Tanganyika African National Union used Swahili as language of mass organisation and political movement. This included publishing pamphlets and radio broadcasts to rally the people to fight for independence. After independence, Swahili was adopted as the national language of the nation. Till this day, Tanzanians carry a sense of pride when it comes to Swahili especially when it is used to unite over 120 tribes across Tanzania. Swahili was used to strengthen solidarity among the people and a sense of togetherness and for that Swahili remains a key identity of the Tanzanian people.

Phonology

Unlike the majority of Niger-Congo languages, Swahili lacks contrastive tone (pitch contour). As a result of that and the language's shallow orthography, Swahili is said to be the easiest African language for an English speaker to learn.

Vowels

Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes: /ɑ/, /ɛ/, /i/, /ɔ/, and /u/. Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress. Swahili vowels can be long; these are written as two vowels (example: Kondoo, meaning "sheep"). This is due to a historical process in which the L became deleted between two examples of the same vowel (Kondoo was originally pronounced Kondolo, which survives in certain dialects). However, these long vowels are not considered to be phonemic. A similar process exists in Zulu.

Consonants

Some dialects of Swahili may also have the aspirated phonemes /pʰ tʰ tʃʰ kʰ bʰ dʰ dʒʰ ɡʰ/ though they are unmarked in Swahili's orthography. Multiple studies favour classifying prenasalization as consonant clusters, not as separate phonemes. The /r/ phoneme is realised as either a short trill or more commonly as a single tap by most speakers. In some Arabic loans (nouns, verbs, adjectives), emphasis or intensity is expressed by reproducing the original emphatic consonants /dˤ, sˤ, tˤ, zˤ/ and the uvular /q/, or lengthening a vowel, where aspiration would be used in inherited Bantu words.

Orthography

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Swahili is now written in the Latin alphabet. There are a few digraphs for native sounds, ch, sh, ng and ny; q and x are not used, c is not used apart from unassimilated English loans and, occasionally, as a substitute for k in advertisements. There are also several digraphs for Arabic sounds, which many speakers outside of ethnic Swahili areas have trouble differentiating.

The language used to be written in the Arabic script. Unlike adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages, relatively little accommodation was made for Swahili. There were also differences in orthographic conventions between cities and authors and over the centuries, some quite precise but others different enough to cause difficulties with intelligibility.

/e/ and /i/, and /o/ and /u/ were often conflated, but in some spellings, /e/ was distinguished from /i/ by rotating the kasra 90° and /o/ was distinguished from /u/ by writing the damma backwards.

Several Swahili consonants do not have equivalents in Arabic, and for them, often no special letters were created unlike, for example, Urdu script. Instead, the closest Arabic sound is substituted. Not only did that mean that one letter often stands for more than one sound, but also writers made different choices of which consonant to substitute. Here are some of the equivalents between Arabic Swahili and Roman Swahili:

That was the general situation, but conventions from Urdu were adopted by some authors so as to distinguish aspiration and /p/ from /b/: پھا /pʰaa/ 'gazelle', پا /paa/ 'roof'. Although it is not found in Standard Swahili today, there is a distinction between dental and alveolar consonants in some dialects, which is reflected in some orthographies, for example in كُٹَ -kuta 'to meet' vs. كُتَ -kut̠a 'to be satisfied'. A k with the dots of y, ـػ‎ـػـ‎ػـ‎ػ‎, was used for ch in some conventions; ky being historically and even contemporaneously a more accurate transcription than Roman ch. In Mombasa, it was common to use the Arabic emphatics for Cw, for example in صِصِ swiswi (standard sisi) 'we' and كِطَ kit̠wa (standard kichwa) 'head'.

Particles such as ya, na, si, kwa, ni are joined to the following noun, and possessives such as yangu and yako are joined to the preceding noun, but verbs are written as two words, with the subject and tense–aspect–mood morphemes separated from the object and root, as in aliyeniambia "he who told me".

Dialects and closely related languages

This list is based on Swahili and Sabaki: a linguistic history.

Dialects

Modern standard Swahili is based on Kiunguja, the dialect spoken in Zanzibar Town, but there are numerous dialects of Swahili, some of which are mutually unintelligible, such as the following:

Old dialects

Maho (2009) considers these to be distinct languages:

• Kimwani is spoken in the Kerimba Islands and northern coastal Mozambique.
• Chimwiini is spoken by the ethnic minorities in and around the town of Barawa on the southern coast of Somalia.
• Kibajuni is spoken by the Bajuni minority ethnic group on the coast and islands on both sides of the Somali–Kenyan border and in the Bajuni Islands (the northern part of the Lamu archipelago) and is also called Kitikuu and Kigunya.
• Socotra Swahili (extinct)
• Sidi, in Gujarat (extinct)

The rest of the dialects are divided by him into two groups:

• Mombasa–Lamu Swahili
  • Lamu
    • Kiamu is spoken in and around the island of Lamu (Amu).
    • Kipate is a local dialect of Pate Island, considered to be closest to the original dialect of Kingozi.
    • Kingozi is an ancient dialect spoken on the Indian Ocean coast between Lamu and Somalia and is sometimes still used in poetry. It is often considered the source of Swahili.
  • Mombasa
    • Chijomvu is a subdialect of the Mombasa area.
    • Kimvita is the major dialect of Mombasa (also known as "Mvita", which means "war", in reference to the many wars which were fought over it), the other major dialect alongside Kiunguja.
    • Kingare is the subdialect of the Mombasa area.
  • Kimrima is spoken around Pangani, Vanga, Dar es Salaam, Rufiji and Mafia Island.
  • Kiunguja is spoken in Zanzibar City and environs on Unguja (Zanzibar) Island. Kitumbatu (Pemba) dialects occupy the bulk of the island.
  • Mambrui, Malindi
  • Chichifundi, a dialect of the southern Kenya coast.
  • Chwaka
  • Kivumba, a dialect of the southern Kenya coast.
  • Nosse Be (Madagascar)
• Pemba Swahili
  • Kipemba is a local dialect of the Pemba Island.
  • Kitumbatu and Kimakunduchi are the countryside dialects of the island of Zanzibar. Kimakunduchi is a recent renaming of "Kihadimu"; the old name means "serf" and so is considered pejorative.
  • Makunduchi
  • Mafia, Mbwera
  • Kilwa (extinct)
  • Kimgao used to be spoken around Kilwa District and to the south.

Maho includes the various Comorian dialects as a third group. Most other authorities consider Comorian to be a Sabaki language, distinct from Swahili.

Other regions

In Somalia, where the Afroasiatic Somali language predominates, a variant of Swahili referred to as Chimwiini (also known as Chimbalazi) is spoken along the Benadir coast by the Bravanese people. Another Swahili dialect known as Kibajuni also serves as the mother tongue of the Bajuni minority ethnic group, which lives in the tiny Bajuni Islands as well as the southern Kismayo region.

In Oman, there are an estimated 22,000 people who speak Swahili. Most are descendants of those repatriated after the fall of the Sultanate of Zanzibar.

Swahili poets

• Shaaban bin Robert
• Mathias E. Mnyampala
• Euphrase Kezilahabi
• Fadhy Mtanga
• Christopher Mwashinga
• Tumi Molekane
• Dotto Rangimoto
• Mohammed Ghassani

See also

• Mandombe script
• Swahili literature
• UCLA Language Materials Project
• Languages of Africa

References

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   David Dalby, 1999/2000, The Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities, Linguasphere Press, Volume Two, pp. 733–735
   Benji Wald, 1994, "Sub-Saharan Africa", Atlas of the World's Languages, Routledge, pp. 289–346, maps 80, 81, 85
2. Hinnebusch, Thomas J. (2003). "Swahili". In William J. Frawley (ed.). International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195139778. First-language (L1) speakers of Swahili, who probably number no more than two million
3. ^ Swahili at Ethnologue (21st ed., 2018) [REDACTED]
   Congo Swahili at Ethnologue (21st ed., 2018) [REDACTED]
   Coastal Swahili at Ethnologue (21st ed., 2018) [REDACTED]
   Makwe at Ethnologue (21st ed., 2018) [REDACTED]
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4. Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
5. Mazrui, Ali Al'Amin. (1995). Swahili state and society : the political economy of an African language. East African Educational Publishers. ISBN 0-85255-729-9. OCLC 441402890.
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8. "HOME – Home". Swahililanguage.stanford.edu. Retrieved 19 July 2016. After Arabic, Swahili is the most widely used African language but the number of its speakers is another area in which there is little agreement. The most commonly mentioned numbers are 50, 80, and 100 million people. The number of its native speakers has been placed at just under 20 million.
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10. "Development and Promotion of Extractive Industries and Mineral Value Addition". East African Community.
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Sources

• Ashton, E. O. Swahili Grammar: Including intonation. Longman House. Essex 1947. ISBN 0-582-62701-X.
• Irele, Abiola and Biodun Jeyifo. The Oxford encyclopedia of African thought, Volume 1. Oxford University Press US. New York City. 2010. ISBN 0-19-533473-6
• Blommaert, Jan: Situating language rights: English and Swahili in Tanzania revisited (sociolinguistic developments in Tanzanian Swahili) – Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, paper 23, University of Gent 2003
• Brock-Utne, Birgit (2001). "Education for all – in whose language?". Oxford Review of Education. 27 (1): 115–134. doi:10.1080/03054980125577.
• Chiraghdin, Shihabuddin and Mathias E. Mnyampala. Historia ya Kiswahili. Oxford University Press. Eastern Africa. 1977. ISBN 0-19-572367-8
• Contini-Morava, Ellen. Noun Classification in Swahili. 1994.
• Lambert, H.E. 1956. Chi-Chifundi: A Dialect of the Southern Kenya Coast. (Kampala)
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• Lambert, H.E. 1958. Chi-Jomvu and ki-Ngare: Subdialects of the Mombasa Area. (Kampala)
• Marshad, Hassan A. Kiswahili au Kiingereza (Nchini Kenya). Jomo Kenyatta Foundation. Nairobi 1993. ISBN 9966-22-098-4.
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• Ogechi, Nathan Oyori: "On language rights in Kenya (on the legal position of Swahili in Kenya)", in: Nordic Journal of African Studies 12(3): 277–295 (2003)
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• Prins, A.H.J. 1970. A Swahili Nautical Dictionary. Preliminary Studies in Swahili Lexicon – 1. Dar es Salaam.
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• Whiteley, Wilfred. 1969. Swahili: the rise of a national language. London: Methuen. Series: Studies in African History.

Italic text==External links==

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• UCLA report on Swahili
• John Ogwana (2001) Swahili Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Factors of Its Development and Expansion
• List of Swahili Dictionaries
• Articles related to Swahili language. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |2= (help); Text "author" ignored (help); line feed character in |list= at position 1361 (help)

• Swahili language
• Swahili culture
• Languages written in Latin script
• Northeast Coast Bantu languages
• Non-tonal languages in tonal families
• Agglutinative languages
• Languages of Kenya
• Languages of Burundi
• Languages of Uganda
• Languages of Tanzania
• Languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Languages of the African diaspora