Kamusi project

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Swahili clock as provided by the Kamusi Project

The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary also known as "Kamusi Project".

This is a project that started at Yale University (USA) and especially its African Languages' Department. This project collects Swahili words together with their English definitions. It is led by its founder and editor, Martin Benjamin.

It may be accessed through its internet address. A user may add any Swahili word or English word from their computer. If the word already exists, the user will get various translations with various meanings and uses.

This project had its teething problems since the beginning of 2006 but has managed to start afresh at least up to now from July 2006. Anyone who is registered is invited to participate in it.

Kamusi is the Swahili word for dictionary. The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary is designed to fill a need in African Studies and East African education. Swahili is spoken natively by various groups traditionally inhabiting about 1,500 miles of the East African coastline. It is spoken by somewhere between 50 and 100 million people throughout East and Central Africa, making it by far the most widely spoken African language. It is the primary language of many millions, the language of commerce and primary instruction for all Tanzania and many parts of Kenya, and the most widely taught African language in the United States and Europe. English is the language of international trade and higher education and a national language of government in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda.

Up-to-date learning resources are in great demand by Swahili-speaking students of English and English-speaking students of Swahili. This project is producing a new set of dictionaries that will replace Johnson's outdated Oxford "Standard" dictionaries, expand upon the work of the Institute of Swahili Research at the University of Dar es Salaam, and remain current into the foreseeable future.

Using the Internet, the project draws on the minds of speakers and scholars of Swahili all over the world. One important aspect of this project is to produce a "living" on-line dictionary that can be updated constantly and available instantaneously from any networked computer anywhere in the world. Print publication is also essential for the project's work to be of use to most people in East Africa, where there are few computers and even fewer Internet access sites.

Printed dictionaries will reach East Africa in two ways:

1) Computer users are encouraged to make and distribute printed versions of the project's electronic dictionaries, provided they always include the copyright notice and list of project participants, and that they never charge any more than their legitimate printing costs, and

2) The World Language Documentation Centre will arrange formal publication with an established press. Project participants implicitly agree that the WLDC has the exclusive right to arrange formal publication and that participants will receive no payment or royalties from publication, although participants will receive full recognition for their participation in all project publications.

The economics of Swahili publishing would normally make a satisfying new Swahili dictionary unlikely. The Kamusi Project is conceived as a way to pool collective resources to produce a better dictionary than would otherwise ever likely be written, while at the same time providing an electronic resource that can be of real use to Africans and people interested in Africa.