Kiswahili.
The Swahili language (Arabic: سواحلي), or Kiswahili,] is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique. Closely related languages, sometimes considered dialects, are spoken in the Comoros Islands and Somalia. Although only five million or so people speak Swahili as their mother tongue, it is used as a lingua franca in much of East Africa, and the total number of speakers exceeds 140 million. Swahili serves as a national, or official language, of four nations: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Some Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic through more than twelve centuries of contact with Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the coast of southeastern Africa. It has also incorporated Persian, German, Portuguese, English, and French words into its vocabulary through contact with empire builders, traders, and slavers during the past five centuries.
Origin
Swahili is traditionally regarded as being the language of Arab-ruled Zanzibar, spread along the coast by the Arab trade in various goods. Whether it was first spoken by natives of the mainland opposite Zanzibar who were brought to Zanzibar as slaves, or whether Zanzibar had a native black population, is uncertain. In post-colonial leftist/African-nationalist scholarship, this history is increasingly reinterpreted as a native black Swahili ethnic group, which already lived along a large area of the coast, engaging in its own maritime trade prior to taking up willing commerce with the Arabs.
In any case Arab traders are known to have had extensive contact with the coastal peoples from at least the 6th century A.D. and Islam began to spread along the East African Coast from at least the 9th century. There is also cultural evidence of early Persian (or Arabo-Persian) settlement on Zanzibar from Shiraz in present-day Iran. The black population of the island holds the tradition that it is descended from intermarriage of these Shirazi with natives (see Shirazi people).
People from Oman and the Persian Gulf settled the Zanzibar Archipelago, helping spread both Islam and the Swahili language and culture with major trading and cultural centers as far as Sofala(Mozambique) and Kilwa (Tanzania) to the south, and Mombasa and Lamu in Kenya, Barawa,Merca, Kismayo and Mogadishu (Somalia) in the north, the Comoros Islands and northern Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
Starting about 1800 A.D., the rulers of Zanzibar organized trading expeditions into the interior of the mainland, up to the various lakes in the continent's East African Rift. They soon established permanent trade routes, and Swahili-speaking merchants settled in stops along the new trade routes. For the most part, this process did not lead to genuine colonization. But colonization did occur west of Lake Malawi, in what is now Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, giving rise to a highly divergent dialect.
The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa in 1711 A.D.,in the Arabic script. They were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. The original letters are now preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India.[10] Another ancient written document is an epic poem in the Arabic script titled Utendi wa Tambuka (The History of Tambuka); it is dated 1728. However, the Latin script later became standard under the influence of European colonial powers.
Colonial period
After Germany seized the region known as Tanganyika (present-day mainland Tanzania) for a colony in 1886, it took notice of the wide (but shallow) dissemination of Swahili, and soon designated Swahili as a colony-wide official administrative language. The British did not do so in neighbouring Kenya, even though they made moves in that direction. The British and Germans both sought to facilitate their rule over colonies where the inhabitants spoke dozens of different languages – thus the colonial authorities selected a single local language which they hoped the natives would find acceptable. Swahili was the only good candidate in these two colonies.
In the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I, it was dispossessed of all its overseas territories. Tanganyika fell into British hands. The British authorities, with the collaboration of British Christian missionary institutions active in these colonies, increased their resolve to institute Swahili as a common language for primary education and low-level governance throughout their East African colonies (Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, and Kenya). Swahili was to be subordinate to English: university education, much secondary education, and governance at the highest levels would be conducted in English.
One key step in spreading Swahili was to create a standard written language. In June 1928, an inter-territorial conference took place at Mombasa, at which the Zanzibar dialect, Kiunguja, was chosen to be the basis for standardizing Swahili. Today's standard Swahili, the version taught as a second language, is for practical purposes Zanzibar Swahili, even though there are minor discrepancies between the written standard and the Zanzibar vernacular.
[edit]Current status
Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three countries, Tanzania, Kenya, and Congo (DRC), where it is an official or national language. The neighboring nation of Uganda made Swahili a required subject in primary schools in 1992—although this mandate has not been well implemented—and declared it an official language in 2005 in preparation for the East African Federation. Swahili, or other closely related languages, is spoken by nearly the entire population of the Comoros and by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Rwanda, northern Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique. and 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 twentieth century.[13][14] In the Guthrie non-genetic classification of Bantu languages, Swahili is included under Zone G.
At the present time, some 90 percent of approximately 39 million Tanzanians speak Swahili in addition to their first languages.[15] Kenya's population is comparable as well, with a greater part of the nation being able to speak Swahili. Most educated Kenyans are able to communicate fluently in Swahili, since it is a compulsory subject in school from grade one to high school and a distinct academic discipline in many of the public and private universities.
The five eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo are Swahili speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese reportedly speak it;[ and it is starting to rival Lingala as the most important national language of that country.
In Uganda, the Baganda and residents of Buganda generally do not speak Swahili, but it is in common use among the 25 million people elsewhere in the country, and is currently being implemented in schools nationwide in preparation for the East African Community.
The usage of Swahili in other countries is commonly overstated, being widespread only in market towns, among returning refugees, or near the borders of Kenya and Tanzania. Even so, Swahili speakers may number some 120 to 150 million people. Many of the world's institutions have responded to Swahili's growing prominence. It is one of the languages that feature in world radio stations such as the BBC World Service, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Voice of Russia, China Radio International, Radio France Internationale, Radio Sudan, and Radio South Africa.
Methali (e.g. Haraka haraka haina baraka – Hurry hurry has no blessing), i.e. "wordplay, risqué or suggestive puns and lyric rhyme, are deeply inscribed in Swahili culture, in form of Swahili parables, proverbs, and allegory".[19] Methali is uncovered globally within 'Swah' rap music. It provides the music with rich cultural, historical, and local textures and insight.
Kiswahili is the Swahili word for the language, and this is also sometimes used in English. The name Kiswahili comes from the plural sawāḥil (سواحل) of the Arabic word sāḥil (ساحل), meaning "boundary" or "coast", used as an adjective meaning "coastal dwellers". With the prefix ki-, it means "coastal language", ki- being a prefix attached to nouns of the noun class that includes languages.
The Swahili language (Arabic: سواحلي), or Kiswahili,] is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique. Closely related languages, sometimes considered dialects, are spoken in the Comoros Islands and Somalia. Although only five million or so people speak Swahili as their mother tongue, it is used as a lingua franca in much of East Africa, and the total number of speakers exceeds 140 million. Swahili serves as a national, or official language, of four nations: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Some Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic through more than twelve centuries of contact with Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the coast of southeastern Africa. It has also incorporated Persian, German, Portuguese, English, and French words into its vocabulary through contact with empire builders, traders, and slavers during the past five centuries.
Origin
Swahili is traditionally regarded as being the language of Arab-ruled Zanzibar, spread along the coast by the Arab trade in various goods. Whether it was first spoken by natives of the mainland opposite Zanzibar who were brought to Zanzibar as slaves, or whether Zanzibar had a native black population, is uncertain. In post-colonial leftist/African-nationalist scholarship, this history is increasingly reinterpreted as a native black Swahili ethnic group, which already lived along a large area of the coast, engaging in its own maritime trade prior to taking up willing commerce with the Arabs.
In any case Arab traders are known to have had extensive contact with the coastal peoples from at least the 6th century A.D. and Islam began to spread along the East African Coast from at least the 9th century. There is also cultural evidence of early Persian (or Arabo-Persian) settlement on Zanzibar from Shiraz in present-day Iran. The black population of the island holds the tradition that it is descended from intermarriage of these Shirazi with natives (see Shirazi people).
People from Oman and the Persian Gulf settled the Zanzibar Archipelago, helping spread both Islam and the Swahili language and culture with major trading and cultural centers as far as Sofala(Mozambique) and Kilwa (Tanzania) to the south, and Mombasa and Lamu in Kenya, Barawa,Merca, Kismayo and Mogadishu (Somalia) in the north, the Comoros Islands and northern Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
Starting about 1800 A.D., the rulers of Zanzibar organized trading expeditions into the interior of the mainland, up to the various lakes in the continent's East African Rift. They soon established permanent trade routes, and Swahili-speaking merchants settled in stops along the new trade routes. For the most part, this process did not lead to genuine colonization. But colonization did occur west of Lake Malawi, in what is now Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, giving rise to a highly divergent dialect.
The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa in 1711 A.D.,in the Arabic script. They were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. The original letters are now preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India.[10] Another ancient written document is an epic poem in the Arabic script titled Utendi wa Tambuka (The History of Tambuka); it is dated 1728. However, the Latin script later became standard under the influence of European colonial powers.
Colonial period
After Germany seized the region known as Tanganyika (present-day mainland Tanzania) for a colony in 1886, it took notice of the wide (but shallow) dissemination of Swahili, and soon designated Swahili as a colony-wide official administrative language. The British did not do so in neighbouring Kenya, even though they made moves in that direction. The British and Germans both sought to facilitate their rule over colonies where the inhabitants spoke dozens of different languages – thus the colonial authorities selected a single local language which they hoped the natives would find acceptable. Swahili was the only good candidate in these two colonies.
In the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I, it was dispossessed of all its overseas territories. Tanganyika fell into British hands. The British authorities, with the collaboration of British Christian missionary institutions active in these colonies, increased their resolve to institute Swahili as a common language for primary education and low-level governance throughout their East African colonies (Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, and Kenya). Swahili was to be subordinate to English: university education, much secondary education, and governance at the highest levels would be conducted in English.
One key step in spreading Swahili was to create a standard written language. In June 1928, an inter-territorial conference took place at Mombasa, at which the Zanzibar dialect, Kiunguja, was chosen to be the basis for standardizing Swahili. Today's standard Swahili, the version taught as a second language, is for practical purposes Zanzibar Swahili, even though there are minor discrepancies between the written standard and the Zanzibar vernacular.
[edit]Current status
Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three countries, Tanzania, Kenya, and Congo (DRC), where it is an official or national language. The neighboring nation of Uganda made Swahili a required subject in primary schools in 1992—although this mandate has not been well implemented—and declared it an official language in 2005 in preparation for the East African Federation. Swahili, or other closely related languages, is spoken by nearly the entire population of the Comoros and by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Rwanda, northern Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique. and 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 twentieth century.[13][14] In the Guthrie non-genetic classification of Bantu languages, Swahili is included under Zone G.
At the present time, some 90 percent of approximately 39 million Tanzanians speak Swahili in addition to their first languages.[15] Kenya's population is comparable as well, with a greater part of the nation being able to speak Swahili. Most educated Kenyans are able to communicate fluently in Swahili, since it is a compulsory subject in school from grade one to high school and a distinct academic discipline in many of the public and private universities.
The five eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo are Swahili speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese reportedly speak it;[ and it is starting to rival Lingala as the most important national language of that country.
In Uganda, the Baganda and residents of Buganda generally do not speak Swahili, but it is in common use among the 25 million people elsewhere in the country, and is currently being implemented in schools nationwide in preparation for the East African Community.
The usage of Swahili in other countries is commonly overstated, being widespread only in market towns, among returning refugees, or near the borders of Kenya and Tanzania. Even so, Swahili speakers may number some 120 to 150 million people. Many of the world's institutions have responded to Swahili's growing prominence. It is one of the languages that feature in world radio stations such as the BBC World Service, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Voice of Russia, China Radio International, Radio France Internationale, Radio Sudan, and Radio South Africa.
Methali (e.g. Haraka haraka haina baraka – Hurry hurry has no blessing), i.e. "wordplay, risqué or suggestive puns and lyric rhyme, are deeply inscribed in Swahili culture, in form of Swahili parables, proverbs, and allegory".[19] Methali is uncovered globally within 'Swah' rap music. It provides the music with rich cultural, historical, and local textures and insight.
Kiswahili is the Swahili word for the language, and this is also sometimes used in English. The name Kiswahili comes from the plural sawāḥil (سواحل) of the Arabic word sāḥil (ساحل), meaning "boundary" or "coast", used as an adjective meaning "coastal dwellers". With the prefix ki-, it means "coastal language", ki- being a prefix attached to nouns of the noun class that includes languages.
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