Swahili language
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- This article is about the language. For the East African people, see Swahili people.
The name Swahili comes from the plural of the Arabic word sahel ساحل: sawahil سواحل meaning "boundary" or "coast" (used as an adjective to mean "coastal dwellers" or, by extension, "coastal language"). Sahel is also the word used for the border zone of the Sahara. The incorporation of the final "i" is likely to be the nisba in Arabic (of the coast سواحلي), although some state it is for phonetic reasons.
Overview
Swahili is a national and official language in Tanzania, Kenya, and UgandaEncyclopedia Britannica. [Uganda]. It is also spoken in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo (DRC), Somalia, Comoros Islands (including Mayotte), Mozambique and Malawi.Swahili belongs to the Sabaki subgroup of the Northeastern coast Bantu languages. It is closely related to the Miji Kenda group of languages, Pokomo, Ngazija, etc. Over a thousand years of intense and varied interaction with the Middle East, Arabia, Persia, India, China, Portugal, and England has given Swahili a rich infusion of loanwords from a wide assortment of languages. The Comorian languages, spoken in the Comoros and Mayotte, are closely related to Swahili.
Despite the substantial number of loanwords present in Swahili, the language is in fact Bantu. In the past, some have held that Swahili is variously a derivative of Arabic, that a distinct Swahili people do not exist, or that Swahili is simply an amalgam of Arabic and African language and culture, though these theories have now been largely discarded. The distinct existence of the Swahili as a people can be traced back over a thousand years, as can their language. In structure and vocabulary Swahili is distinctly Bantu and shares far more culturally and lingustically with other Bantu languages and peoples than it does with Arabic, Persian, Indian etc. In fact, it is estimated that the proportion of non-African language loanwords in Swahili is comparable to the proportion of French, Latin, and Greek loanwords in the English language.
The first known transcriptions of Swahili used the Arabic script, but the Latin alphabet has since become standard under the influence of European colonial powers. See [Omniglot] for details.
As in English, the proportion of loan words changes as the speaker is communicating at a "lower" or "higher class" situation. In English, a discussion of say, body functions, sounds much nicer if you use Latin-derived words with occasional French terms rather than Germanic-derived words (so-called four-letter words); an educated Swahili speaker will likewise use many more Arabic-derived words with English terms in polite circumstances, though the same phrase could usually be said in Swahili using only words of Bantu origin.
One of the most famous phrases in Swahili is "hakuna matata" from Disney's "Lion King" and "Timon and Pumbaa" cartoon series. It means "no problem" or "no worries" (literally: "there are no problems"). Disney's characters Simba and Rafiki also owe their names to Swahili, meaning 'lion' and 'friend' respectively. The African American holiday of Kwanzaa derives its name from the Swahili word kwanza which means "first" or "beginning." Safari (meaning "journey") is another Swahili word that has spread worldwide.
Name
"Kiswahili" is the Swahili word for the Swahili language, and is also sometimes used in English. 'Ki-' is a prefix attached to nouns of the class that includes languages (see Noun classes below), 'Swahili' being the main noun stem from which comes the more common English term for the language. There are three "states" to which this main noun stem refers as follows: Kiswahili refers to the 'Swahili Language'; Waswahili refers to the people of the 'Swahili Coast'; and Swahili refers to the 'Culture' of the Swahili People. See Bantu languages for a more detailed discussion on main noun stems.Sounds
Vowels
Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. They are very similar to the vowels of Spanish and Italian. Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress. The vowels are pronounced as follows:
- /a/ is pronounced like the "a" in father
- /e/ is pronounced like the "e" in bed
- /i/ is pronounced like the "i" in ski
- /o/ is pronounced like the first part of the "o" in American English home, or like a tenser version of "o" in British English "lot"
- /u/ is pronounced like the "u" in haiku
Semivowels
Standard Swahili has also two semivowels, y (/ɥ/) and w (/ʊ̯/). They are used to make diphthongs, as in the passive form of verbs (kupendwa, to be loved, from kupenda, to love). Other examples can be mpya, new, pronounced m-pya, and mbwa, dog, pronounced m-bwa.Consonants
| Bilabial | Labio- dental | Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar | (Alveolo-) palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
| Nasal stop | m
|