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- Swahili (swa)


Swahili, also known as Kiswahili, is spoken primarily in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique (along the East African coast and adjacent litoral islands). Swahili has borrowed a number of words from foreign languages, particularly Arabic and Persian, but also words from Portuguese, English and German. Around forty percent of Swahili vocabulary consists of Arabic loanwords, including the name of the language (سَوَاحِلي sawāḥilī, a plural adjectival form of an Arabic word meaning 'of the coast'). The loanwords date from the era of contact between Arab slave traders and the Bantu inhabitants of the east coast of Africa.

Swahili is one of three official languages (the others being English and French) of the East African Community (EAC) countries, namely Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. It is a lingua franca of other areas in the African Great Lakes region and East and Southern Africa, including some parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Malawi, Mozambique, the southern tip of Somalia, and Zambia. Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and of the Southern African Development Community. The number of Swahili speakers is estimated to be around 200 million including 20 million who speak it as their first language.

The Swahili speakers are almost entirely Islamic with only 1.73% Christian. Of the 24 people groups, 14 are classified as frontier, meaning that they have never had contact with Christianity. The three largest groups live in Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Tanzania.

Sources: Wikipedia
The Joshua Project
https://unravellingmag.com/articles/swahili/



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Swahili language map

There are an abundance of vowels in Swahili words; all Swahili words, with few exceptions, end in a vowel. Additionally, there are almost no consonant clusters. Consonant-ending words that are borrowed from other languages, i.e. English, are often modified with the addition of a vowel at the end of the syllable/word, such as “bank” à benki.

Swahili has an intricate and complex noun class system, something completely foreign to most English speakers. Nouns are split into categories: there is a category for human nouns and a category for inanimate objects, for example. Noun roots have noun class prefixes, or NCPs. Prefixes are then numbered according to the content of the noun group and the plurality of the noun. For example, the category of human nouns belongs to the NCP class 1 in the singular, and class 2 in the plural. In speech, ‘toto’ is the noun root for child; as a human noun, this belongs to categories 1 and 2, as explained. One child, then, is ‘mtoto’. Two children, the plural, moves the noun to class 2; children is ‘watoto’. Similarly, ‘ti’, the noun root for tree, belongs to noun class 3 (singular) and 4 (plural), under the category of inanimate objects. One tree is ‘mti’, and two trees are ‘miti’ . This may seem to be a complicated concept for those who are not well-acquainted with Swahili, but it is actually an incredibly useful way to classify and understand the relationship between the language and the objects it represents.