Swahili, also known as Kiswahili, is a Bantu language of the Atlantic–Congo language family, originally spoken by the Swahili people, who are found primarily in Tanzania, Kenya, and Mozambique (along the East African coast and adjacent littoral islands). Estimates of the number of Swahili speakers, including both native and second-language speakers, generally range from 40 million to 200 million. Most native speakers reside in TanzaniaIn 2023 70.4% of Tanzanians answered that Swahili is their primary language at home: see https://www.afrobarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Summary-of-results-Tanzania-Afrobarometer-R9-28july23.pdf Q.2 and Kenya.
About 40% of Swahili vocabulary consists of Arabic loanwords, including the name of the language itself ( , a plural adjectival form of an Arabic word meaning 'of the coasts'). Swahili also has a significant number of loanwords from Portuguese, English and German. The Arabic loanwords date from the era of contact between Arab slave traders and the Bantu inhabitants of the east coast of Africa, which was also the time period when Swahili emerged as a lingua franca in the region.
Due to concerted efforts by the governments of Tanzania and Kenya, Swahili is one of three official languages (alongside English and French) of the East African Community (EAC) countries, which are Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda. It is the lingua franca of other areas in the African Great Lakes region and East and Southern Africa.Prins 1961 Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and of the Southern African Development Community. The East African Community created an institution called the East African Kiswahili Commission (EAKC) which began operations in 2015. The institution currently serves as the leading body for promoting the language in the East African region, as well as for coordinating its development and usage for regional integration and sustainable development. In recent years Somalia, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Ethiopia, and South Sudan have begun offering Swahili as a subject in schools or have developed plans to do so.
Shikomor (or Comorian), an official language in Comoros that is also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is closely related to Swahili and is sometimes considered a dialect, although other authorities consider it a distinct language.Nurse and Hinnebusch, 1993, p. 18 In 2022, based on Swahili's growth as a prominent international language, the United Nations declared Swahili Language Day as 7 July to commemorate the date that Julius Nyerere adopted Swahili as a unifying language for Tanganyikan independence struggles.
Classification Swahili is a Bantu language of the Sabaki branch.Derek Nurse, Thomas J. Hinnebusch, Gérard Philippson. 1993. Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. University of California Press 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 consider the Arabic influence on Swahili to be significant, since about 40% of its vocabulary is taken directly from Arabic, and it was initially spoken along the East African coast.Derek Nurse, Thomas T. Spear. 1985. Arabic loan words make up to 40% of the language. The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800–1500. University of Pennsylvania PressThomas Spear. 2000. "Early Swahili History Reconsidered". The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 257–290
History
Etymology The word "Swahili" comes from an Arabic name for the area, meaning "coasts": → → "coast" "coasts" (broken plural) "coastal" or "coastal inhabitant"
Origin The core of the Swahili language originates in Bantu languages of the coast of East Africa. Much of Swahili's Bantu vocabulary has cognates in the Unguja, Pemba, and Mijikenda languages and, to a lesser extent, other East African Bantu languages. While opinions vary on the specifics, it has been historically purported that about 16–20% of the Swahili vocabulary is derived from loan words, the vast majority Arabic, but also other contributing languages, including Persian, Hindustani, Portuguese, and Malay. The South Cushitic languages preceded the Bantu languages in today's Tanzania and Kenya, and have left many loanwords in Bantu languages in the interior of the countries, but they had very little direct impact on Swahili or the other Sabaki languages spoken on the coast.
+ Source languages for loanwords in Swahili"1. Loanwords in Swahili", T. Schadeberg, in Tadmor, Uri. Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Germany: De Gruyter, 2009. Source languages Percentage Arabic (mainly Omani Arabic) 40% English 4.6% Portuguese 0.9–1.0% Hindustani 0.7–3.9% Persian (mainly Iranian Persian) 0.4–3.4% Malagasy 0.2–0.4%
Omani Arabic is the source of most Arabic loanwords in Swahili.Baldi, Sergio, Arabic Loans in East African Languages through Swahili: A Survey , Folia Orientalia, 2012, PAS Journals RepositoryNurse and Hinnebusch, 1993, p. 321 In the text "Early Swahili History Reconsidered", however, Thomas Spear noted that Swahili retains a large 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 (which is reported as a parent language) whereas 4–17% were loan words from other African languages. Only 2–8% were from non-African languages, and Arabic loan words constituted a fraction of that. According to other sources, about 40% of the Swahili vocabulary comes from Arabic. What also remained unconsidered was that a good number of the borrowed terms had Bantu equivalents. The preferred use of Arabic loan words is prevalent along the coast, where local people, in a cultural show of proximity to, or descent from, Arab culture, would rather use loan words, whereas the people in the interior tend to use the Bantu equivalents. It was originally written in Arabic script.
The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa, Tanzania, 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.
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 script. 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 ) 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 German 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 [Kenya and Uganda] 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
Overview Estimates of the total number of first- and second-language Swahili speakers vary widely, from as low as 50 million to as high as 200 million, but generally range from 60 million to 150 million.The Encyclopedia of the World's Minorities (ed. Carl Skutsch; publ. Taylor & Francis; 2013), pages 183–184: "The most important single [Bantu language] is Swahili as a primary or secondary language (50 million speakers)." John M. Mugane, The Story of Swahili (2015), page 1: "In terms of speakers, [Swahili] is peer to the dozen or so languages of the world that boast close to 100 million users" [footnoted to page 287:] "The World Bank estimates that 120 to 150 million people speak Swahili as a second language; William J. Frawley (2003, 181) puts the number at a minimum of 75 million, and Ethnologue has it as 40 million. This book takes the higher number as closer to the reality, given that Swahili is well known as a lingua franca in countries whose populations far exceed 150 million." (Page 227: "Africa's Swahili-speaking region, in which 100 million people who speak it as a second language have created a diverse array of [varieties]".) University of Arizona Critical Languages Program: "[estimates] vary widely, from 60 million to over 150 million".
Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions of people in the five African Great Lakes countries (Kenya, DR Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania), where it is an official or national language. It is also the first language for 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 other local languages and dialects. There, it is a first language for most of the people who are 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.Nurse & Thomas Spear (1985) The Swahili The language was still understood in the southern ports of the Red Sea in the 20th century.Adriaan Hendrik Johan Prins (1961) The Swahili-speaking Peoples of Zanzibar and the East African Coast. Ethnologue The East African Community created an institution called the East African Kiswahili Commission (EAKC) which began operations in 2015. The institution currently serves as the leading body for promoting the language in the East African region, as well as for coordinating its development and usage for regional integration and sustainable development.
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, 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.Hurskainen, Arvi. 2018. Sustainable language technology for African languages. In Agwuele, Augustine and Bodomo, Adams (eds), The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics, 359–375. London: Routledge Publishers.
Tanzania