Swahili language

Swahili
Kiswahili
Native to Tanzania, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Mozambique (mostly Mwani), Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda,[1] Comoros, Mayotte, and the margins of Zambia, Malawi, Madagascar, and South Sudan
Native speakers
 2 million[2][3] to 15 million. (2012)[4]
L2 speakers: 50 to 100 million[2]
Latin script (Roman Swahili alphabet),
Arabic script (Arabic Swahili alphabet)
Swahili Braille
Official status
Official language in
 Tanzania, Kenya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, African Union, East African Community
Regulated by Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (Tanzania), Chama cha Kiswahili cha Taifa (Kenya)
Language codes
ISO 639-1 sw
ISO 639-2 swa
ISO 639-3 swa – inclusive code
Individual codes:
swc – Congo Swahili
swh – Coastal Swahili
ymk – Makwe
wmw – Mwani
Glottolog swah1254[5]
G.42–43;
G.40.A–H (pidgins & creoles)[6]
Linguasphere 99-AUS-m

  areas where Swahili or Comorian is the indigenous language
  official or national language
  as a trade language

Swahili, also known as Kiswahili, is a Bantu language and the first language of the Swahili people. It is a lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).[7] Although sometimes considered to be a dialect of Swahili, Comorian, spoken in the Comoros Islands, is a distinct language.[8]

Estimates of the total number of Swahili speakers vary widely, from 50 million to over 100 million.[2][9] Swahili serves as a national language of three nations: Tanzania, Kenya, and the DRC. Shikomor, the official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is related to Swahili.[10] Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and officially recognised as a lingua franca of the East African Community.[11]

A significant fraction of Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic through contact with Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants of the Swahili Coast.[12]

History

Swahili in Arabic script—memorial plate at the Askari Monument, Dar es Salaam (1927)

Origin

Clove farmers from Oman[13] and the Persian Gulf farmed the Zanzibar Archipelago.

The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa 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.[14]

Colonial period

Although originally written with the Arabic script, Swahili is now written in a Latin alphabet introduced by Christian missionaries and colonial administrators. The text shown here is the Catholic version of the Lord's Prayer.[15]

One key step in spreading Swahili was to create a standard written language. 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.[16]

Current status

Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three African Great Lakes countries (Tanzania, Kenya, and the DRC) where it is an official or national language. In 2016, Swahili was made a compulsory subject in all Kenyan schools.[17]

Swahili and closely related languages are spoken by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, the Comoros, Rwanda, Malawi, Mozambique, and northern Zambia.[18] The language was still understood in the southern ports of the Red Sea and along the coasts of southern Arabia and the Persian Gulf in the 20th century.[13][19]

Some 80 percent of approximately 49 million Tanzanians speak Swahili in addition to their first languages.[20]

The five eastern provinces of the DRC are Swahili-speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese reportedly speak it.[21]

Swahili speakers may number 120 to 150 million.[22]

Methali (e.g. Haraka haraka haina baraka – Hurry hurry has no blessing),[23] i.e. "wordplay, risqué or suggestive puns and lyric rhyme, are deeply inscribed in Swahili culture, in form of Swahili parables, proverbs, and allegory".[24]

Phonology

Vowels

Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes: /ɑ/, /ɛ/, /i/, /ɔ/, and /u/. The actual phonetic realization of /u/ is [ʊ]. Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress, but they are pronounced in full as follows:[25]

Consonants

Swahili consonant phonemes[26]
Labial Dental Alveolar Postalveolar
/ palatal		 Velar Glottal
Nasal m ⟨m⟩ n ⟨n⟩ ɲ ⟨ny⟩ ŋ ⟨ng'⟩
Stop prenasalized ᵐb ⟨mb⟩ ⁿd ⟨nd⟩ ᶮɟ~ⁿdʒ ⟨nj⟩ ᵑɡ ⟨ng⟩
implosive ɓ ⟨b⟩ ɗ ⟨d⟩ ʄ ⟨j⟩ ɠ ⟨g⟩
tenuis p ⟨p⟩ t ⟨t⟩ tʃ ⟨ch⟩ k ⟨k⟩
aspirated pʰ ⟨p⟩ tʰ ⟨t⟩ tʃʰ ⟨ch⟩ kʰ ⟨k⟩
Fricative prenasalized ᵐv ⟨mv⟩ ⁿz ⟨nz⟩
voiced v ⟨v⟩ (ð ⟨dh⟩) z ⟨z⟩ (ɣ ⟨gh⟩)
voiceless f ⟨f⟩ (θ ⟨th⟩) s ⟨s⟩ ʃ ⟨sh⟩ (x ⟨kh⟩) h ⟨h⟩
Flap ɾ ⟨r⟩
Approximant l ⟨l⟩ j ⟨y⟩ w ⟨w⟩

Orthography

Swahili Arabic script on a one-pysar coin from Zanzibar circa 1882 (written as 1299 AH on the coin)
Swahili Arabic script on a carved wooden door (open) at Lamu in Kenya
Swahili Arabic script on wooden door in Fort Jesus, Mombasa in Kenya
Swahili in Arabic script on the clothes of a woman in Tanzania (ca. early 1900s)


Swahili is currently written in a slightly defective alphabet using the Latin script; the defectiveness comes in that it does not distinguish aspirated consonants, but in some dialects, pronunciation does not distinguish them anyway. (These were, however, distinguished as kh etc. in the old German colonial Latin alphabet.) There are two digraphs for native sounds, ch and sh; c is not used apart from unassimilated English loans and, occasionally, as a substitute for k in advertisements. There are also several digraphs for Arabic sounds not distinguished in pronunciation outside of traditional Swahili areas.

The language used to be written in the Arabic script. Unlike adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages, relatively little accommodation was made for Swahili. There were also differences in orthographic conventions between cities and authors and over the centuries, some quite precise but others defective enough to cause difficulties with intelligibility.

/e/ and /i/, /o/ and /u/ were often conflated, but in some spellings, /e/ was distinguished from /i/ by rotating the kasra 90° and /o/ was distinguished from /u/ by writing the damma backwards.

Several Swahili consonants do not have equivalents in Arabic, and for them, often no special letters were created unlike, for example, in Persian and Urdu scripts. Instead, the closest Arabic sound is substituted. Not only did that mean that one letter often stands for more than one sound, but also writers made different choices of which consonant to substitute. Here are some of the equivalents between Arabic Swahili and Roman Swahili:

Arabic
Swahili		Roman
Swahili
ا aa
ب b p mb mp bw pw mbw mpw
ت t nt
ث th?
ج j nj ng ng' ny
ح h
خkh h
د d nd
ذ dh?
ر r d nd
ز z nz
س s
ش sh ch
ص s, sw
ض dhw
ط t tw chw
ظ z th dh dhw
ع ?
غ gh g ng ng'
ف f fy v vy mv p
ق k g ng ch sh ny
ك
ل l
م m
ن n
ه h
و w
ي y ny

That was the general situation, but conventions from Urdu were adopted by some authors such as to distinguish aspiration and /p/ from /b/: پھا /pʰaa/ 'gazelle', پا /paa/ 'roof'. Although it is not found in Standard Swahili today, there is a distinction between dental and alveolar consonants in some dialects, which is reflected in some orthographies, for example in كُٹَ -kuta 'to meet' vs. كُتَ -kut̠a 'to be satisfied'. A k with the dots of y, ڱ, was used for ch in some conventions; ky being historically and even contemporaneously a more accurate transcription than Roman ch. In Mombasa, it was common to use the Arabic emphatics for Cw, for example in صِصِ swiswi (standard sisi) 'we' and كِطَ kit̠wa (standard kichwa) 'head'.

Word division differs from Roman norms. Particles such as ya, na, si, kwa, ni are joined to the following noun, and possessives such as yangu and yako are joined to the preceding noun, but verbs are written as two words, with the subject and tense–aspect–mood morphemes separated from the object and root, as in aliye niambia "he who asked me".[27]

Grammar

Noun classes

Semantic motivation

The ki-/vi- class historically consisted of two separate genders, artefacts (Bantu class 7/8, utensils and hand tools mostly) and diminutives (Bantu class 12), which were conflated at a stage ancestral to Swahili. Examples of the former are kisu "knife", kiti "chair" (from mti "tree, wood"), chombo "vessel" (a contraction of ki-ombo). Examples of the latter are kitoto "infant", from mtoto "child"; kitawi "frond", from tawi "branch"; and chumba (ki-umba) "room", from nyumba "house". It is the diminutive sense that has been furthest extended. An extension common to diminutives in many languages is approximation and resemblance (having a 'little bit' of some characteristic, like -y or -ish in English). For example, there is kijani "green", from jani "leaf" (compare English 'leafy'), kichaka "bush" from chaka "clump", and kivuli "shadow" from uvuli "shade". A 'little bit' of a verb would be an instance of an action, and such instantiations (usually not very active ones) are found: kifo "death", from the verb -fa "to die"; kiota "nest" from -ota "to brood"; chakula "food" from kula "to eat"; kivuko "a ford, a pass" from -vuka "to cross"; and kilimia "the Pleiades", from -limia "to farm with", from its role in guiding planting. A resemblance, or being a bit like something, implies marginal status in a category, so things that are marginal examples of their class may take the ki-/vi- prefixes. One example is chura (ki-ura) "frog", which is only half terrestrial and therefore is marginal as an animal. This extension may account for disabilities as well: kilema "a cripple", kipofu "a blind person", kiziwi "a deaf person". Finally, diminutives often denote contempt, and contempt is sometimes expressed against things that are dangerous. This might be the historical explanation for kifaru "rhinoceros", kingugwa "spotted hyena", and kiboko "hippopotamus" (perhaps originally meaning "stubby legs").

Another class with broad semantic extension is the m-/mi- class (Bantu classes 3/4). This is often called the 'tree' class, because mti, miti "tree(s)" is the prototypical example. However, it seems to cover vital entities neither human nor typical animals: trees and other plants, such as mwitu 'forest' and mtama 'millet' (and from there, things made from plants, like mkeka 'mat'); supernatural and natural forces, such as mwezi 'moon', mlima 'mountain', mto 'river'; active things, such as moto 'fire', including active body parts (moyo 'heart', mkono 'hand, arm'); and human groups, which are vital but not themselves human, such as mji 'village', and, by analogy, mzinga 'beehive/cannon'. From the central idea of tree, which is thin, tall, and spreading, comes an extension to other long or extended things or parts of things, such as mwavuli 'umbrella', moshi 'smoke', msumari 'nail'; and from activity there even come active instantiations of verbs, such as mfuo "metal forging", from -fua "to forge", or mlio "a sound", from -lia "to make a sound". Words may be connected to their class by more than one metaphor. For example, mkono is an active body part, and mto is an active natural force, but they are also both long and thin. Things with a trajectory, such as mpaka 'border' and mwendo 'journey', are classified with long thin things, as in many other languages with noun classes. This may be further extended to anything dealing with time, such as mwaka 'year' and perhaps mshahara 'wages'. Animals exceptional in some way and so not easily fitting in the other classes may be placed in this class.

The other classes have foundations that may at first seem similarly counterintuitive.[28] In short,

Agreement

Swahili phrases agree with nouns in a system of concord, but if the noun refers to a human, they accord with noun classes 1-2 regardless of their noun class. Verbs agree with the noun class of their subjects and objects; adjectives, prepositions and demonstratives agree with the noun class of their nouns. In Standard Swahili (Kiswahili sanifu), based on the dialect spoken in Zanzibar, the system is rather complex; however, it is drastically simplified in many local variants where Swahili is not a native language, such as in Nairobi. In non-native Swahili, concord reflects only animacy: human subjects and objects trigger a-, wa- and m-, wa- in verbal concord, while non-human subjects and objects of whatever class trigger i-, zi-. Infinitives vary between standard ku- and reduced i-.[29] ("Of" is animate wa and inanimate ya, za.)

In Standard Swahili, human subjects and objects of whatever class trigger animacy concord in a-, wa- and m-, wa-, and non-human subjects and objects trigger a variety of gender-concord prefixes.

Swahili noun-class concord
NCSemantic
field		Noun
-C, -V		Subj.Obj-aAdjective
-C, -i, -e[* 1]
1 person m-, mw- a- m- wa m-, mwi-, mwe-
2 people wa-, w- wa- wa- wa wa-, we-, we-
3 tree m- u- wa m-, mwi-, mwe-
4 trees mi- i- ya mi-, mi-, mye-
5 group, AUG ji-/Ø, j- li- la ji-/Ø, ji-, je-
6 groups, AUG ma- ya- ya ma-, mi-, me-
7 tool, DIM ki-, ch- ki- cha ki-, ki-, che-
8 tools, DIM vi-, vy- vi- vya vi-, vi-, vye-
9 animals, 'other',
loanwords		 N- i- ya N-, nyi-, nye-
10 zi- za
11 extension u-, w-/uw- u- wa m-, mwi-, mwe-
10 (plural of 11) N- zi- za N-, nyi-, nye-
14 abstraction u-, w-/uw- u- wa m-, mwi-, mwe-
or u-, wi-, we-
15 infinitives ku-, kw-[* 2] ku- kwa- ku-, kwi-, kwe-
16 position -ni, mahali pa- pa pa-, pi-, pe-
17 direction, around -ni ku- kwa ku-, kwi-, kwe-
18 within, along -ni mu- mwa mu-, mwi-, mwe-
  1. ↑ Most Swahili adjectives begin with either a consonant or the vowels i- or e-, listed separately above. The few adjectives beginning with other vowels do not agree with all noun classes since some are restricted to humans. NC 1 m(w)- is mw- before a and o, and reduces to m- before u; wa- does not change; and ki-, vi-, mi- become ch-, vy-, my- before o but not before u: mwanana, waanana "gentle", mwororo, waororo, myororo, chororo, vyororo "mild, yielding", mume, waume, kiume, viume "male".
  2. ↑ In a few verbs: kwenda, kwisha

This list is based Swahili and Sabaki: a linguistic history.

Dialects

Modern standard Swahili is based on Kiunguja, the dialect spoken in Zanzibar Town, but there are numerous dialects of Swahili, some of which are mutually unintelligible, such as the following:[30]

Old dialects

Maho (2009) considers these to be distinct languages:

The rest of the dialects are divided by him into two groups:

Maho includes the various Comorian dialects as a third group. Most other authorities consider Comorian to be a Sabaki language, distinct from Swahili.[31]

Other regions

In Somalia, where the Afro-Asiatic Somali language predominates, a variant of Swahili referred to as Chimwiini (also known as Chimbalazi) is spoken along the Benadir coast by the Bravanese people.[32] Another Swahili dialect known as Kibajuni also serves as the mother tongue of the Bajuni minority ethnic group, which lives in the tiny Bajuni Islands as well as the southern Kismayo region.[32][33]

In Oman, an estimated 22,000 people speak Swahili.[34] Most are descendants of those repatriated after the fall of the Sultanate of Zanzibar.[35][36]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Thomas J. Hinnebusch, 1992, "Swahili", International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford, pp. 99–106
    David Dalby, 1999/2000, The Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities, Linguasphere Press, Volume Two, pp. 733–735
    Benji Wald, 1994, "Sub-Saharan Africa", Atlas of the World's Languages, Routledge, pp. 289–346, maps 80, 81, 85
  2. 1 2 3 "HOME - Home". Swahililanguage.stanford.edu. Retrieved 19 July 2016. After Arabic, Swahili is the most widely used African language but the number of its speakers is another area in which there is little agreement. The most commonly mentioned numbers are 50, 80, and 100 million people. [...] The number of its native speakers has been conservatively placed at just under 2 million.
  3. ↑ Hinnebusch, Thomas J. (2003). "Swahili". In William J. Frawley. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Subscription required (help)). First-language (L1) speakers of Swahili, who probably number no more than two million [...]
  4. ↑ Swahili at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Congo Swahili at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Coastal Swahili at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Makwe at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Mwani at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  5. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Swahili (G.40)". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  6. ↑ Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
  7. ↑ Prins 1961
  8. ↑ Nurse and Hinnebusch, 1993, p.18
  9. ↑ Karanja, Peter N. (2012). "Kiswahili Dialects Endangered: The Case of Kiamu and Kimvita" (PDF). International Journal of Humanities and Social Science: 95–117.
  10. ↑ Nurse and Hinnebusch, 1993
  11. ↑ http://www.eac.int/treaty/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=206&Itemid=331
  12. ↑ The Routledge Concise Compendium of the World's Languages (2nd ed.), George L. Campbell and Gareth King. Routledge (2011), p. 678. ISBN 978-0-415-47841-0
  13. 1 2 Kharusi, N. S. (2012). "The ethnic label Zinjibari: Politics and language choice implications among Swahili speakers in Oman". Ethnicities. 12 (3): 335–353. doi:10.1177/1468796811432681.
  14. ↑ E. A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa, London, 1975.., pp. 98–99 ; T. Vernet, "Les cités-Etats swahili et la puissance omanaise (1650–1720), Journal des Africanistes, 72(2), 2002, pp. 102–105.
  15. ↑ "Baba yetu". Wikisource. Retrieved 15 November 2015.
  16. ↑ Mdee, James S. (1999). "Dictionaries and the Standardization of Spelling in Swahili". Lexikos. pp. 126–7. Retrieved 2 June 2017.
  17. ↑ Wanambisi, Laban (5 December 2016). "International schools must teach Kiswahili, Kenya's history – Matiang'i". Capital News. Retrieved 8 December 2016.
  18. ↑ Nurse & Thomas Spear (1985) The Swahili
  19. ↑ Adriaan Hendrik Johan Prins (1961) The Swahili-speaking Peoples of Zanzibar and the East African Coast. (Ethnologue)
  20. ↑ Brock-Utne 2001: 123
  21. ↑ Kambale, Juakali (10 August 2004). "DRC welcomes Swahili as an official AU language". Mail & Guardian. Retrieved 8 September 2009.
  22. ↑ (2005 World Bank Data).
  23. ↑ Swahili proverbs Kishwahili.net, retrieved 10 March 2013
  24. ↑ Lemelle, Sidney J. "'Ni wapi Tunakwenda': Hip Hop Culture and the Children of Arusha". In The Vinyl Ain't Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture, ed. by Dipannita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle, 230–54. London; Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pluto Press.
  25. ↑ "Swahili alphabet, pronunciation and language".
  26. ↑ "Swahili alphabet, pronunciation and language".
  27. ↑ Jan Knappert (1971) Swahili Islamic poetry, Volume 1
  28. ↑ See Contini-Morava for details.
  29. ↑ Kamil Ud Deen, 2005. The acquisition of Swahili.
  30. ↑ H.E.Lambert 1956, 1957, 1958
  31. ↑ Derek Nurse; Thomas Spear; Thomas T. Spear. The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500. p. 65.
  32. 1 2 "Somalia". Ethnologue. 1999-02-19. Retrieved 2015-11-15.
  33. ↑ Mwakikagile, Godfrey (2007). Kenya: identity of a nation. New Africa Press. p. 102. ISBN 0-9802587-9-0.
  34. ↑ "Oman". Ethnologue. 1999-02-19. Retrieved 2015-11-15.
  35. ↑ Fuchs, Martina (2011-10-05). "African Swahili music lives on in Oman". Reuters. Retrieved 2015-11-15.
  36. ↑ Beate Ursula Josephi, Journalism education in countries with limited media freedom, Volume 1 of Mass Communication and Journalism, (Peter Lang: 2010), p.96.

References

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