Swahili language
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. Comorian, spoken in the Comoros Islands, is sometimes considered a dialect of Swahili, although other authorities consider it a distinct language. Sheng is mixture of Swahili and English commonly spoken in Kenya and parts of Uganda.
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, is related to Swahili. Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and officially recognised as a lingua franca 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.
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. 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 dates its origin to the Bantu people of the coast of East Africa. Much of Swahili's Bantu vocabulary has cognates in the Pokomo, Taita and Mijikenda languages and, to a lesser extent, other East African Bantu languages. While opinions vary on the specifics, it is generally purported that about 30% of the Swahili vocabulary is derived from loan words, the majority Arabic. Other contributing languages are Persian, Hindustani, Portuguese, and Malay. It is also important to bear in mind that such sources carry strong colonial bias that would rather indicate the evolution of Kiswahili as a creole of sorts, a language completed with the coming of Arab conquest, rather than a language fully formed with a borrowing of words at the advent of trade and conquest along the coast. This assumption, questionably, further implied that the Arab invasion along the Eastern Coast of Africa was necessary to its formation as a language. In the text "Early Swahili History Reconsidered", Thomas Spear noted that Swahili retained a tremendous amount of grammar, vocabulary, and sounds inherited from the Sabaki Language. In fact, while taking account of daily vocabulary, using lists of one hundred words, 72-91% were inherited from the Sabaki language whereas 4-17% were loan words from other African languages.To a lesser proportion, 2-8% were from non-African languages. Arabic loan words consited a fraction of the 2-8%. What also remained unconsidered was that a good number of the borrowed terms had native equivalents. The preferred use of Arabic loan words is prevalent along the coast, where natives, in a cultural show of proximity to, or descent from Arab culture, would rather express in loan word terms, whereas the natives in the interior tend to use the native equivalents. 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 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. 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, 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, 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 national language in Tanzania came after Tanganyika gained independence in 1961 and the government decided that it would be used as a language to unify the new nation. This 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. 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 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 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 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
Vowels
Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes:,,,, and. According to Ellen Contini-Morava, vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress. However, according to Edgar Polomé, these five phonemes can vary in pronunciation. Polomé claims that,,, and are pronounced as such only in stressed syllables. In unstressed syllables, as well as before a prenasalized consonant, they are pronounced as,,, and. E is also commonly pronounced as mid-position after w. Polomé claims that is pronounced as such only after w and is pronounced as in other situations, especially after . A can be pronounced as in word-final position. Swahili vowels can be long; these are written as two vowels. This is due to a historical process in which the L became deleted between two examples of the same vowel. 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 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. X exists in free variation with h, and are only distinguished by some speakers. In some Arabic loans, emphasis or intensity is expressed by reproducing the original emphatic consonants and the uvular, or lengthening a vowel, where aspiration would be used in inherited Bantu words.Orthography
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.
and, and and were often conflated, but in some spellings, was distinguished from by rotating the kasra 90° and was distinguished from 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 from : پھا 'gazelle', پا '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, , 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 'we' and كِطَ kit̠wa '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".
Grammar
Noun classes
Swahili nouns are separable into classes, which are roughly analogous to genders in other languages. For example, just as suffix <-o> in Spanish marks masculine objects, and <-a> marks feminine ones, so, in Swahili, prefixes mark groups of similar objects:Semantic motivation
The ki-/vi- class historically consisted of two separate genders, artefacts and diminutives, which were conflated at a stage ancestral to Swahili. Examples of the former are kisu "knife", kiti "chair", chombo "vessel". Examples of the latter are kitoto "infant", from mtoto "child"; kitawi "frond", from tawi "branch"; and chumba "room", from nyumba "house". It is the diminutive sense that has been furthest extended. An extension common to diminutives in many languages is approximation and resemblance. For example, there is kijani "green", from jani "leaf", kichaka "bush" from chaka "clump", and kivuli "shadow" from uvuli "shade". A 'little bit' of a verb would be an instance of an action, and such instantiations are found: kifo "death", from the verb -fa "to die"; kiota "nest" from -ota "to brood"; chakula "food" from kula "to eat"; kivuko "a ford, a pass" from -vuka "to cross"; and kilimia "the Pleiades", from -limia "to farm with", from its role in guiding planting. A resemblance, or being a bit like something, implies marginal status in a category, so things that are marginal examples of their class may take the ki-/vi- prefixes. One example is chura "frog", which is only half terrestrial and therefore is marginal as an animal. This extension may account for disabilities as well: kilema "a cripple", kipofu "a blind person", kiziwi "a deaf person". Finally, diminutives often denote contempt, and contempt is sometimes expressed against things that are dangerous. This might be the historical explanation for kifaru "rhinoceros", kingugwa "spotted hyena", and kiboko "hippopotamus".Another class with broad semantic extension is the m-/mi- class. This is often called the 'tree' class, because mti, miti "tree" is the prototypical example. However, it seems to cover vital entities neither human nor typical animals: trees and other plants, such as mwitu 'forest' and mtama 'millet' ; supernatural and natural forces, such as mwezi 'moon', mlima 'mountain', mto 'river'; active things, such as moto 'fire', including active body parts ; and human groups, which are vital but not themselves human, such as mji 'village', and, by analogy, mzinga 'beehive/cannon'. From the central idea of tree, which is thin, tall, and spreading, comes an extension to other long or extended things or parts of things, such as mwavuli 'umbrella', moshi 'smoke', msumari 'nail'; and from activity there even come active instantiations of verbs, such as mfuo "metal forging", from -fua "to forge", or mlio "a sound", from -lia "to make a sound". Words may be connected to their class by more than one metaphor. For example, mkono is an active body part, and mto is an active natural force, but they are also both long and thin. Things with a trajectory, such as mpaka 'border' and mwendo 'journey', are classified with long thin things, as in many other languages with noun classes. This may be further extended to anything dealing with time, such as mwaka 'year' and perhaps mshahara 'wages'. Animals exceptional in some way and so not easily fitting in the other classes may be placed in this class.
The other classes have foundations that may at first seem similarly counterintuitive. In short,
- Classes 1–2 include most words for people: kin terms, professions, ethnicities, etc., including translations of most English words ending in -er. They include a couple of generic words for animals: mnyama 'beast', mdudu 'bug'.
- Classes 5–6 have a broad semantic range of groups, expanses, and augmentatives. Although interrelated, it is easier to illustrate if broken down:
- *Augmentatives, such as joka 'serpent' from nyoka 'snake', lead to titles and other terms of respect : Bwana 'Sir', shangazi 'aunt', fundi 'craftsman', kadhi 'judge'
- *Expanses: ziwa 'lake', bonde 'valley', taifa 'country', anga 'sky'
- **from this, mass nouns: maji 'water', vumbi 'dust', kaa 'charcoal', mali 'wealth', maridhawa 'abundance'
- *Collectives: kundi 'group', kabila 'language/ethnic group', jeshi 'army', daraja ' stairs', manyoya 'fur, feathers', mapesa 'small change', manyasi 'weeds', jongoo 'millipede', marimba 'xylophone'
- **from this, individual things found in groups: jiwe 'stone', tawi 'branch', ua 'flower', tunda 'fruit', yai 'egg', mapacha 'twins', jino 'tooth', tumbo 'stomach', and paired body parts such as jicho 'eye', bawa 'wing', etc.
- **also collective or dialogic actions, which occur among groups of people: neno 'a word', from kunena 'to speak' ; pigo 'a stroke, blow', from kupiga 'to hit'; gomvi 'a quarrel', shauri 'advice, plan', kosa 'mistake', jambo 'affair', penzi 'love', jibu 'answer', agano 'promise', malipo 'payment'
- **From pairing, reproduction is suggested as another extension, but these generally duplicate one or more of the subcategories above
- Classes 9–10 are used for most typical animals: ndege 'bird', samaki 'fish', and the specific names of typical beasts, birds, and bugs. However, this is the 'other' class, for words not fitting well elsewhere, and about half of the class 9–10 nouns are foreign loanwords. Loans may be classified as 9–10 because they lack the prefixes inherent in other classes, and most native class 9–10 nouns have no prefix. Thus they do not form a coherent semantic class, though there are still semantic extensions from individual words.
- Class 11 are mostly nouns with an "extended outline shape", in either one dimension or two:
- *mass nouns that are generally localized rather than covering vast expanses: uji 'porridge', wali 'cooked rice'
- *broad: ukuta 'wall', ukucha 'fingernail', upande 'side', wavu 'net', wayo 'sole, footprint', ua 'fence, yard', uteo 'winnowing basket'
- *long: utambi 'wick', utepe 'stripe', uta 'bow', ubavu 'rib', ufa 'crack', unywele 'a hair'
- **from 'a hair', singulatives of nouns, which are often class 6 in the plural: unyoya 'a feather', uvumbi 'a grain of dust', ushanga 'a bead'.
- Class 14 are abstractions, such as utoto 'childhood' and have no plural. They have the same prefixes and concord as class 11, except optionally for adjectival concord.
- Class 15 are verbal infinitives.
- Classes 16–18 are locatives. The Bantu nouns of these classes have been lost; the only permanent member is the Arabic loan mahali 'place', but in Mombasa Swahili, the old prefixes survive: pahali 'place', mwahali 'places'. However, any noun with the locative suffix -ni takes class 16–18 agreement. The distinction between them is that class 16 agreement is used if the location is intended to be definite, class 17 if indefinite or involves motion, and class 18 if it involves containment : mahali pazuri 'a good spot', mahali kuzuri 'a nice area', mahali muzuri.
Agreement
In Standard Swahili, human subjects and objects of whatever class trigger animacy concord in a-, wa- and m-, wa-, and non-human subjects and objects trigger a variety of gender-concord prefixes.
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 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 and is also called Kitikuu and Kigunya.
- Socotra Swahili
- Sidi, in Gujarat
- Mombasa–Lamu Swahili
- *Lamu
- **Kiamu is spoken in and around the island of Lamu.
- **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, 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 Island. Kitumbatu 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
- 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
- *Kimgao used to be spoken around Kilwa District and to the south.
Other regions
In Somalia, where the Afroasiatic Somali language predominates, a variant of Swahili referred to as Chimwiini 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.