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- Under the influence of European colonial powers, the Latin alphabet became standard for written Swahili. Although originally written in Arabic script, Swahili orthography is now based on the Latin alphabet that was introduced by Christian missionaries and colonial administrators.
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Some dialects of Swahili may also have the aspirated phonemes /pʰ tʰ tʃʰ kʰ bʱ dʱ dʒʱ ɡʱ/ though they are unmarked in Swahili's orthography. Multiple studies favour classifying prenasalization as consonant clusters, not as separate phonemes.
- Bantu Languages
The Bantu languages (English: UK: / ˌ b æ n ˈ t uː /, US: /...
- Swahili People
Language Swahili Arabic script on a one-pysar coin from...
- Niger–Congo
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over...
- Sabaki Language
The Sabaki languages are the Bantu languages of the Swahili...
- Swahili Grammar
Swahili is a Bantu language which is native to or mainly...
- Bantu Languages
Swahili, also known by its local name Kiswahili, is a Bantu language originally spoken by the Swahili people, who are found primarily in Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique (along the East African coast and adjacent littoral islands).
- The Rise of Swahili to Regional Prominence
- Foreign Loan Words
- Swahili Language
- Swahili Time
- Dialects of Swahili and Languages Closely Related to Swahili
- Current Usage of Swahili
- Swahili Literature
- Swahili in Non-African Popular Culture
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There is as yet insufficient historical or archaeological evidence to establish, with confidence, when and where either the Swahili language or the Swahili ethnicity emerged. Nevertheless, it is assumed that the Swahili speaking people have occupied their present territories, hugging the Indian Ocean, since well before 1000 C.E.. Arab invaders from...
A thousand years of contact between Indian Ocean peoples and Swahili resulted in a large number of borrowed words entering the language, mainly from Arabic, but also from other languages such as Persian and various Indian languages. At different periods Swahili also borrowed vocabulary from Portuguese and English. The proportion of such borrowed wo...
Sounds
Swahili is unusual among sub-Saharan languages in having lost the feature of lexical tone (with the exception of the Mijikenda dialect group that includes the numerically important Mvita dialect, the dialect of Kenya's second city, the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa).
Vowels
Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes: /ɑ/, /ɛ/, /i/, /ɔ/, and /u/. They are very similar to the vowels of Spanish and Italian, though /u/ stands between /u/ and /o/in those languages. Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress. The vowels are pronounced as follows: 1. /ɑ/ is pronounced like the "a" in father 2. /ɛ/ is pronounced like the "e" in bed 3. /i/ is pronounced like the "i" in ski 4. /ɔ/ is pronounced like the first part of the "o" in American English home, or like a tenser ve...
Consonants
Notes: 1. The nasal stops are pronounced as separate syllables when they appear before a plosive (mtoto [m.to.to] "child," nilimpiga [ni.li.m.pi.ɠa] "I hit him"), and prenasalized stops are decomposed into two syllables when the word would otherwise have one (mbwa [m.bwa] "dog"). However, elsewhere this doesn't happen: ndizi "banana" has two syllables, [ndi.zi], as does nenda [ne.nda] (not *[nen.da]) "go." 2. The fricatives in parentheses, th dh kh gh, are borrowed from Arabic. Many Swahili s...
(East African) Swahili time runs from dawn (at six a.m.) to dusk (at six p.m.), rather than midnight to midday. Seven a.m. and seven p.m. are therefore both “one o'clock,” while midnight and midday are “six o'clock.” Words such as asubuhi "morning," jioni "evening," and usiku"night" can be used to demarcate periods of the day, for example: 1. saa m...
Dialects of Swahili
Modern standard Swahili is based on Kiunguja,the dialect spoken in Zanzibar town. There are numerous local dialects of Swahili, including the following. 1. Kiunguja:Spoken in Zanzibar town and environs on Zanzibar island. Other dialects occupy the bulk of the island. 2. Kitumbatu and Kimakunduchi:The countryside dialects of the island of Zanzibar. Kimakunduchi is a recent renaming of "Kihadimu;" the old name means "serf," hence it is considered pejorative. 3. Kimrima: Spoken around Pangani, V...
Languages similar to Swahili
1. Kimwani:Spoken in the Kerimba Islands and northern coastal Mozambique. 2. Kingwana: Spoken in the eastern and southern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sometimes called Copperbelt Swahili,especially the variety spoken in the south. 3. Comorian language,the language of the Comoros Islands, which form a chain between Tanzania and the northern tip of Madagascar. 4. Chimwiiniwas traditionally spoken around the Somali town of Barawa. In recent years, most of its speakers have fl...
At the present time, some 90 percent of approximately 39 million Tanzanians speak Swahili. Kenya's population is comparable, but the prevalence of Swahili is lower, though still widespread. The five eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (to be subdivided in 2009) are Swahili speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese speak it;an...
The first literary works in Swahili date back to the beginning of the eighteenth century, when all Swahili literature was written in the Arabic script. Jan Knappert considered the translation of Arabic poem Hamziya from the year 1652 to be the earliest Swahili written text. Starting in the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries and orientalists...
In Civilization IV, the title music is a rearrangement of the Lord's Prayer in Swahili, sharing the same name—"Baba Yetu" ("Our Father"). In Michael Jackson's 1987 single, "Liberian Girl," the repeated intro is the Swahili phrase "Nakupenda pia, nakutaka pia, mpenzi wee!" which translates "I love you too, and I want you too, my love!" Disney's anim...
Ashton, E. O. 1947. Swahili Grammar: Including Intonation. Essex: Longman House. ISBN 0-582-62701-X.Brock-Utne, Birgit. 2001. Education for all—in whose language? Oxford Review of Education27(1): 115-134.Chiraghdin, Shihabuddin, and Mathias Mnyampala. 1977. Historia ya Kiswahili. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-572367-8.Contini-Morava, Ellen. 1994. Noun Classification in Swahili. Retrieved January 9, 2009.Swahili is a Bantu language spoken mainly in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, and also in Burundi, Mozambique, Oman, Somalia the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa. Estimates for the total number of Swahili speakers range from 88 million to 200 million.
The Swahili language is a language widely spoken in East Africa. In the language, its name is Kiswahili. It is a Bantu language . Swahili is spoken in a wide area from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique and in all of Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi. Congo has five million first-language speakers and fifty million second-language speakers.
- 26 million (2007), 120 million L2 speakers
May 2, 2024 · Swahili language, Bantu language spoken either as a mother tongue or as a fluent second language on the east coast of Africa in an area extending from Lamu Island, Kenya, in the north to the southern border of Tanzania in the south. (The Bantu languages form a subgroup of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family.)
Swahili Ajami script refers to the alphabet derived from Arabic script that is used for the writing of Swahili language. Ajami is a name commonly given to alphabets derived from Arabic script for the use of various African languages, from Swahili to Hausa, Fula, and Wolof.
