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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 aproximately five million first language speakers and fifty million second language speakers. Swahili has become a lingua franca for east Africa and surrounding areas.
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.
Noun classes
The most salient feature of its grammar is its division of nouns into a number of 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