Swahili Language

The Swahili Language

The Swahili language is an East African language of Bantu origin. It is the native tongue of the Swahili people who reside along the East African coast from Somalia to Mozambique. It is spoken by more than 35 million people worldwide, with approximately 5 million people using at their first language. Swahili is the official language of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, though it is also spoken Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, and Mozambique. The Swahili language shows a great Middle Eastern influence, and the history of the people reflects that.

Once believed to be direct descendants of Persian settlers, the ancient group of Swahili is now acknowledged as native Bantu peoples who were able to maintain interactions with the Persian explorers around the 7th and 8th centuries AD. The Swahili were a distinctive group that eventually lost its independence to the Portuguese in the 15th century. The Arabs eventually dislodged the Portuguese from power, and overtook the Swahili in the late 16th century. By the 19th century, the slave trade was prominent in the regions. At the beginning of the 20th century, Britain and Germany helped to lay the groundwork of the modern territories of the Swahili peoples.

The Swahili language is a member of the Saloki group of the Northeastern coast Bantu languages. The Bantu languages are a family of languages that in turn belong to the Niger-Congo language group.  Structurally, the Swahili language is faithfully a Bantu tongue. It shares more cultural and linguistic ties with the Bantu languages and peoples than it does with any other languages of groups that came into contact with the Swahili people. However, in modern times, the influence of these other cultural groups over Swahili is apparent. For example, there are many borrowed words from Arabic due to the usage of the Koran by the Swahili people for spiritual reference. There are also borrowed terms from Portuguese, Persian, English, and German in the modern Swahili vernacular.

The speakers of the Swahili language refer to the language as Kiswahili. The word Swahili comes from the plural form of the word Sahel, which is Sawahil, Arabic for "coast". The first Swahili texts appear in the Arabic alphabet. In fact, the earliest known document in Swahili was a poetic epic, published in 1728 in the Arabic script.  Since the occupation of the European colonists, though, the Latin alphabet has replaced the Arabic alphabet in use for the Swahili language.

The structure of the Swahili language is comparable to several other Bantu languages, and includes a noun class exclusively for humans. Swahili arranges its nouns into 14 classes. These 14 noun classes include 6 classes for singular nouns, 6 classes for plural nouns, 1 class for infinitives, and 1 class entirely for the noun mahali, or "place". This noun class system is based on the research of German linguist Carl Meinhof, who was renowned for his studies of African languages. The Swahili language employs its verbs to express several different points, including plurality, tense, and even conjunction clauses (and, but, or, etc.) by combining a root word with different prefixes or suffixes.

In Eastern Africa today, there are over 15 distinct dialects of the Swahili language. However, Kiunguja, the Zanzibar dialect is the center of standard modern Swahili. There is one dialect, however, that is gaining distinction among the more cosmopolitan people of the region. The use of the Sheng dialect, which is a sort of slang, has become popular. Its origins are in the slums of Nairobi, but it is now considered chic to use in informal conversation among some of the population.

The Swahili language is the official language of the ancient Swahili people. Through occupation by other cultures, the Swahili have seen a great deal of influence come over their culture, especially over their native tongue. In our own English-speaking culture, however, we see some influence from the Swahili as well.  For example, the term "Kwanzaa" is a Swahili word meaning "first" or "beginning", and is the name of a popular African American holiday celebration. In addition, the word safari, a term used around the world, is of Swahili origin.  The influence of the Swahili language bridges the oceans and continents.

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