What’s Swahili?

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Swahili is a Bantu language spoken throughout East Africa by over 40 million people. It is related to other Bantu languages ​​such as Lusoga, Zulu, Xhosa and Ngumba, although it is often very different from these languages. Although Swahili is only spoken by around 5 million people as a native language, it has become something of a lingua franca in Africa, allowing speakers of many different Bantu languages ​​to converse. It is for this reason that the number of overall speakers has increased to over 40 million people, a huge amount for a native African language on a continent with a myriad of popular tribal languages.

Swahili has official language status in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. These three countries are all located on the northeastern coast of Africa on the edge of the Indian Ocean. It is also widely spoken in neighboring Somalia, Mozambique, Malawi, Burundi and Rwanda.

Not so long ago, and to this day in some circles, Swahili was considered an amalgam language formed by the immersion of Arabic into the local languages. This theory is all but discredited in the mainstream linguistic community, as there is ample evidence that the Swahili people of East Africa have been speaking a language roughly analogous to modern Swahili for almost a thousand years. Furthermore, the structure and many words of Swahili share such close similarities with other Bantu languages ​​that a genetic connection is almost certain.

Swahili uses a surprising amount of loanwords, however, due to the large traffic of Arabic-speaking traders over long periods of time, as well as speakers of Indic languages, Persian and, in the modern age, English. While this prevalence of loanwords, particularly from Arabic, is often spoken of, the number of loanwords is quite comparable to English use of Latin and Greek.

Modern Swahili is written using the Latin script, a change that occurred during the European occupation of the east coast of Africa during the 19th century. Early Swahili probably had no written script, and in the 19th century, until the emergence of the Latin script in the 18th century, the Arabic script was used to write Swahili.

Learning Swahili can be very difficult for native English speakers with little experience of languages ​​drastically other than English. And the use of a large group of classes for words, which are denoted by prefixes like m- and n-, can be a tough thing for some English speakers to wrap their heads around. While essentially the same as the gender system used by some European languages, the Swahili class system is both broader than most Romance speakers are used to, and less arbitrary in its assignment.
Swahili also uses some phonetic constructions that can be difficult for English speakers to use naturally. An initial m- or n-, for example, when followed by another consonant, forms a sound that has no real corollary at the beginning of English words. The Swahili word for “banana,” for example, ndizi, has a sound that can take some getting used to for English or Romance speakers.

A popular appearance of Swahili in the English-speaking world was in Disney’s film The Lion King. The Swahili word for “lion”, simba, is used as the name of the main character, a lion. The film’s popular catchphrase, hakuna matata is also a Swahili phrase, which roughly means “no problem.”

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