1. Swahili Language Presentation

Overview. Swahili (also called Kiswahili) is a major Bantu language spoken in East Africa. There are an estimated 100,000,000 speakers, which makes it the most widely spoken language on the African continent

Swahili is spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Indian Ocean coastline from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique, including the Comoros Islands. Although only 5-10 million people speak it as their native language, Swahili is also a lingua franca of much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a national or official language of four nations ( Kenya, Tanzania, DRC, Uganda), and is the only language of African origin among the official working languages of the African Union. Swahili has been greatly influenced by Arabic; there are an enormous number of Arabic loanwords in the language, including the word swahili, from Arabic sawāḥilī (a plural adjectival form of an Arabic word meaning “of the coast”). The language dates from the contacts of Arabian traders with the inhabitants of the east coast of Africa over many centuries. Under Arab influence, Swahili originated as a lingua franca used by several closely related Bantu-speaking tribal groups. In the early 19th century, the spread of Swahili inland received a great impetus from its being the language of the Arab ivory and slave caravans, which penetrated as far north as Uganda and as far west as Congo. Swahili was later adopted by European colonialists, especially the Germans, who used it extensively as the language of administration in Tanganyika, thus laying the foundation for its adoption as a national language of independent Tanzania. In Kenya and Uganda, other local languages also received official encouragement during the colonial period, but the tendency in these countries is now to emphasize the use of Swahili. The oldest preserved Swahili literature, which dates from the early 18th century, is written in the Arabic script, though the language is now written in the Roman alphabet.

There are about 15 main Swahili dialects, as well as several pidgin forms in use. The three most important dialects are kiUnguja (or Kiunguja), spoken on Zanzibar and in the mainland areas of Tanzania; kiMvita (or Kimvita), spoken in Mombasa and other areas of Kenya; and kiAmu (or Kiamu), spoken on the island of Lamu and adjoining parts of the coast. Standard Swahili is based on the kiUnguja dialect.

Swahili is characteristically Bantu in its grammar, and it has a large vocabulary of word roots traceable to a common Bantu stock. Swahili nouns are divided into classes on the basis of their singular and plural prefixes; prefixes are also used to bring verbs, adjectives, and demonstrative and possessive forms into agreement with the subject of a sentence. Thus, in a sentence with wa-tu, “people” (singular m-tu, “person”), all the words begin with the w-/wa- prefix; e.g., wa-tu w-etu wa-le wa-kubwa wa-mekuja: “those big people of ours have come.” Verb stems may be extended by means of varying suffixes, each one with its particular nuance of meaning; e.g., funga (“shut”), fungwa (“be shut”), fungika (“become shut”), fungia (“shut for”), fungisha (“cause to shut”), and so on.

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WATCH THIS SWAHILI MOVIE WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES TO IMMERSE YOURSELF IN THE SWAHILI LANGUAGE AND CULTURE