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Swahili language

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Swahili (also Kiswahili) is an agglutinative Bantu language widely spoken in East Africa. Swahili is the mother tongue of the Swahili people who inhabit a 1500 km stretch of the East African coast from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique. There are approximately five million first-language speakers and fifty million second-language speakers. Swahili has become a lingua franca for east Africa and surrounding areas.

Overview

The traditional centre of the language has been Zanzibar, and Swahili is an official language of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. The Swahili spoken in Nairobi incorporates significantly more English loanwords than that spoken on the coast, and in Tanzania Swahili is the most widely used language. The language is also spoken in regions that border these three countries, such as far northern Malawi and Mozambique, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, and southern Ethiopia. The Zanzibar dialect is known as Kiunguja.

Swahili belongs to the Sabaki subgroup of the Northeastern coast bantu languages. It is closely related to the Mijikenda group of languages, Pokomo, Ngazija etc. Over at least a thousand years of intense and varied interaction with the Middle East, Arabia, Persia, India and China has transformed Swahili into a cosmopolitan language with a rich infusion of loan words from a wide assortment of languages, for example, Arabic, Farsi etc. However, despite many assertions to the contrary, Swahili is an authentic Bantu language, in its history, culture, grammatical structure, vocabulary and origins. The Swahili people are a distinct bantu ethnic group with a long history of settlement and culture on the East African coast.

It is important to emphasize that despite the substantial number of loan words present in Swahili, the language is in fact Bantu. Numerous misconceptions, originating in the colonial period, hold 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. None of these assertions hold water. The distinct existence of the Swahili as a people can be traced back over a thousand years, as can their language Swahili. 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, Persia, India etc. In fact it is estimated that the proportion of non-African lanuguage loan words in Swahili is comparable to the proportion of French, Latin and Greek loan words in the English language.

Noun classes

In common with all Bantu languages Swahili grammar arranges nouns into a number of classes. A total of 22 noun classes - according to the Meinhof system - are possible across all Bantu languages, with all languages sharing at least ten of these. Swahili employs a total of fifteen noun classes. Words beginning with m- whose plural changes it to wa- denote persons, e.g. mtoto 'child', plural watoto. The infinite of verbs begins with ku-, e.g. kusoma 'to read'. Other classes are harder to categorize. Singulars beginning ki- take plurals in vi-: this even applies to foreign words where the ki- is originally part of the root, not a prefix, so vitabu 'books'. This class also contains diminutives, and languages. Words beginning with u- are often abstract, with no plural, e.g. utoto 'childhood'.

A fifth class begins with n- or m- or nothing, and its plural is the same. Another m- class takes plurals in mi-, e.g. mti 'tree', miti trees. Another class usually has no ending in the singular, and takes ma- in the plural. When the noun itself does not make clear which class it belongs to, its concords do. Adjectives and numerals take the noun prefixes, and verbs take a different set of prefixes. 

 Mtoto   mmoja   anasoma                 Watoto   wawili wanasoma
 child   one     is reading              children two    are reading
 One child is reading                    Two children are reading

 Kitabu kimoja kinatosha                 Vitabu viwili vinatosha 
 book   one    suffices                  book   two    suffice
 One book suffices                       Two books suffice

 Ndizi  moja inatosha                    Ndizi  mbili zinatosha
 banana one  suffices                    banana two   suffice
 One banana suffices                     Two bananas suffice

Verb Affixation

Swahili verbs consist of a root and a number of affixes (mostly prefixes) which can be attached to mean express grammatical persons, tense and many clauses that would require a conjunction in other languages (usually prefixes). As sometimes these affixes are sandwiched inbetween the root word and other affixes, some linguists have mistakenly assumed that Swahili uses infixes which is not the case.

In most dictionaries verbs are listed in their root form, for example -kata meaning 'to cut/chop'. In a simple sentence prefixes for grammatical person are added, e.g. ninakata. Ni- means 'I' and na- means <present progressive>. Note that na is not an infix even though it is inbetween two : 

 ni-        na-          kata                 'I am cutting'
 1stSING.   PRES.PROG.   cut/chop

Now this sentence can be modified either by changing the subject prefix or the tense prefix, for example: 


 u-         na-          kata                 'You are cutting'
 2ndSING.   PRES.PROG.   cut/chop

 u-         me-          kata                 'You have cut'
 2ndSING.   PRES.PROG.   cut/chop


The simple present is more complicated and learners often take some of the phrases for slang before they discover the proper usage. Nasoma means 'I read'. This is not short for ninasoma ('I am reading'). a- is the tense prefix for simple past and the vowel of the prefix ni- is assimilated. That way it is difficult to tell the prefixes as part and easier to consider them as one, e.g.: 


 na-                     soma                 'I read'
 1stSING.:PRES.          read

 mwa-                    soma                 'You (pl.) read'
 2ndPLUR.:PRES.          read


The complete list of basic subject prefixes is (for m-/wa- or human class): 


                 SINGULAR           PLURAL
 1st PERSON        ni-                tu-
 2nd PERSON        u-                 m-
 3rd PERSON        a-                 wa-

The most common tense prefixes are: 

 a-    <simple present>
 na-   <present progressive>
 me-   <present perfect>
 li-   <past tense>
 ta-   <future tense>


However it is not only tenses in the sense the word is used in English that can be expressed by tense prefixes: conjunctions can be used in this context as well. For example ki- is the prefix for <conditional> - the sentence "nikinunua nyama wa mbuzi sokoni, nitapika leo" means 'If I buy goat meat at the market, I'll cook today'. The conjunction 'if' in this sentence is simply represented by -ki.

A third prefix can be added, the object prefix. It is placed just before the root and can either refer to a person, replace an object or emphasize a particular one, e.g.: 


 a-        na-         mw-           ona         'I (am) see(ing) him/her'
 3rdSING.  PRES.PROG.  OBJ3rdSING    see    

 ni-       na-         mw-      ona      mtoto   'I (am) see(ing) the child'
 1stSING.  PRES.PROG.  KL.1     see      child


There are not just prefixes. The root of a word is not really the one proposed by most dictoraries - the final vowel is an affix too. The suffix provided by dictionaries means <indicative>. Other forms occur for instance with negation, e.g. sisomi (the 0 in this case means zero-morpheme, i.e. it represents an empty space): 


 si-              0         som       -i          'I am not reading/ I don't read'
 1stSING:NEG      PRES      read      NEG


Other instances of this change of the final vowel include the conjunctive, where an -e is implemented. This goes only for Bantu verbs ending with -a, ones derived from Arabic follow more complex rules.

Other suffixes, which once again look suspiciously like infixes, are placed before the end vowel, e.g. 


 wa-        na-          pig      -w        -a    'They are being hit'
 3rdPLUR.   PRES.PROG.   hit       PASSIVE  IND.


Dialects

Since colonial times circa 1870 to 1960 and into the present time Kiunguja, the Zanzibar dialect of Swahili has become the basis of Standard Swahili as used in East Africa. Nevertheless Swahili encompasses more than fifteen distinct dialects including:

  • Kiunguja: Spoken on Zanzibar island and environs. The basis of Standard Swahili.
  • Kimrima: Spoken around Pangani, Vanga, Dar es Salaam, Rufiji and Mafia.
  • Kimgao:Spoken around Kilwa and to the south.
  • Kipemba: Spoken around Pemba.
  • Kimvita: Spoken in and around Mvita or Mombasa. Historically the major dialect alongside Kiunguja.
  • Kiamu: Spoken in and around the island of Lamu (Amu).
  • Kingwana: Spoken in the western regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
  • Kingazija: Spoken in the Comoros islands.


  • Kingozi: Is a special case as it was the language of the inhabitants of the ancient town of "Ngozi" and is perhaps the basis of the Swahili language.

External links and references