Swahili language Totally Explained

Everything about Swahili Language totally explained

Swahili (called Kiswahili in the language itself) is the first language of the Swahili people (Waswahili), who inhabit several large stretches of the Indian Ocean coastline from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique, including the Comoros Islands. Although only 5-10 million people speak it as their native language, Swahili is a lingua franca of much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a national or official language of four nations, and is the only African language among the official working languages of the African Union.

Overview

Swahili is spoken natively by various groups traditionally inhabiting about 1,500 miles of the East African coastline. About 25% of the Swahili vocabulary derives from the Arabic language, resulting from the fact that the language evolved through centuries of contact between Arabic-speaking traders and many different Bantu-speaking peoples inhabiting Africa's Indian Ocean coast. It also has incorporated Persian, German, Indian and English words into its vocabulary due to contact with these different groups of people. Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three countries, Tanzania, Kenya, and Congo (DRC), where it's an official or national language. The neighboring nation of Uganda made Swahili a required subject in primary schools in 1992 — although this mandate hasn't been well implemented — and declared it an official language in 2005. Swahili, or other closely related languages, is also used by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Rwanda, Mozambique, Somalia, and Zambia, and nearly the entire population of the Comoros.
   In the Guthrie nongenetic classification of Bantu languages, Swahili is included under Bantoid/Southern/Narrow Bantu/Central/G.
   The name 'Kiswahili' comes from the plural of the Arabic word sāhel ساحل: sawāhil سواحل meaning "boundary" or "coast" (used as an adjective to mean "coastal dwellers" or, by adding 'ki-' ["language"] to mean "coastal language"). (The word "sahel" is also used for the border zone of the Sahara ("desert")). The incorporation of the final "i" is likely to be the nisba (adjectival form) in Arabic (of the coast "sawāhalii" سواحلي), although some state it's for phonetic reasons.
   One of the earliest known documents in Swahili is an epic poem in the Arabic script titled Utendi wa Tambuka ("The History of Tambuka"); it's dated 1728. The Latin alphabet has since become standard under the influence of European colonial powers.
Mithali (for example), for example “wordplay, risqué or suggestive puns and lyric rhyme, are deeply inscribed in Swahili culture, in form of Swahili parables, proverbs, and allegory”. Mithali is uncovered globally within ‘Swah’ rap music. It provides the music with rich cultural, historical, and local textures and insight.

Name

"Kiswahili" is the Swahili word for the Swahili language, and this is also sometimes used in English. 'Ki-' is a prefix attached to nouns of the noun class that includes languages (see Noun classes below). Kiswahili refers to the 'Swahili Language'; Waswahili refers to the people of the 'Swahili Coast'; and Uswahili refers to the 'Culture' of the Swahili People. See Bantu languages for a more detailed discussion of the grammar of nouns.

Sounds

Swahili is unusual among sub-Saharan languages in having lost the feature of lexical tone (with the exception of the Mijikenda dialect group that includes the numerically important Mvita dialect, the dialect of Kenya's second city, the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa).

Vowels

Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes: /ɑ/, /ɛ/, /i/, /ɔ/, and /u/. The pronunciation of the phoneme /u/ stands between International Phonetic Alphabet [u] and [o] (as found in Italian, for example). Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress. The vowels are pronounced as follows:

/ɑ/ is pronounced like the "a" in father
/ɛ/ is pronounced like the "e" in bed
/i/ is pronounced like the "i" in ski
/ɔ/ is pronounced like the "o" in American English horse, or like a tenser version of "o" in British English "lot"
/u/ is pronounced between the "u" in rude and the "o" in wrote.

Swahili has no diphthongs; in vowel combinations, each vowel is pronounced separately. Therefore the Swahili word for "leopard", chui, is pronounced /tʃu.i/, with hiatus.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labio- dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal stop	m /m/			n /n/		ny /ɲ/	ng’ /ŋ/
Prenasalized stop	mb /mb/			nd /nd/		nj /ɲɟ/~/ndʒ/	ng /ŋɡ/
Implosive stop	b /ɓ/			d /ɗ/		j /ʄ/	g /ɠ/
Tenuis stop	p /p/			t /t/	ch /tʃ/		k /k/
Aspirated stop	p /pʰ/			t /tʰ/	ch /tʃʰ/		k /kʰ/
Prenasalized fricative		mv /ɱv/		nz /nz/
Voiced fricative		v /v/	(dh /ð/)	z /z/			(gh /ɣ/)
Voiceless fricative		f /f/	(th /θ/)	s /s/	sh /ʃ/		(kh /x/)	h /h/
Trill				r /r/
Lateral approximant				l /l/
Approximant						y /j/	w /w/

Notes:

The nasal stops are pronounced as separate syllables when they appear before a plosive (mtoto [m.to.to] "child", nilimpiga [ni.li.m.pi.ɠa] "I hit him"), and prenasalized stops are decomposed into two syllables when the word would otherwise have one (mbwa [m.bwa] "dog"). However, elsewhere this doesn't happen: ndizi "banana" has two syllables, [ndi.zi], as does nenda [ne.nda] (not *[nen.da]) "go".

The fricatives in parentheses, th dh kh gh, are borrowed from Arabic. Many Swahili speakers pronounce them as [sz h r], respectively.

Swahili orthography doesn't distinguish aspirate from tenuis consonants. When nouns in the N-class begin with plosives, they're aspirated (tembo [tembo] "palm wine", but tembo [tʰembo] "elephant") in some dialects. Otherwise aspirate consonants are not common.

Swahili l and r are confounded by many speakers (the extent to which this is demonstrated generally depends on the original mother tongue spoken by the individual), and are often both realized as /ɺ/

Noun classes

In common with all Bantu languages, Swahili grammar arranges nouns into a number of classes. The ancestral system had 22 classes, counting singular and plural as distinct according to the Meinhof system, with most Bantu languages sharing at least ten of these. Swahili employs sixteen: six classes that usually indicate singular nouns, five classes that usually indicate plural nouns, a class for abstract nouns, a class for verbal infinitives used as nouns, and three classes to indicate location. � :is traditionaly spoken in the lower Juba province in Somalia near to Kismayo city as a dialect by the Bantu Negroes who were brought there in the 19th century as slave.

The rise of Swahili to regional prominence

There is as yet insufficient historical or archaeological evidence to allow one to state exactly when and where either the Swahili language or the Swahili culture emerged. Nevertheless, it's assumed that the Swahili speaking people have occupied their present territories, hugging the Indian Ocean, since well before AD 1000. Arab and Persian traders are known to have had extensive contact with the coastal peoples from at least the 6th Century of the Christian Era, and Islam began to spread along the East African Coast from at least the 9th Century.
   People from Oman and the Persian Gulf settled the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, 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, Kismayu and Mogadishu (Somalia) in the north, the Comoros Islands and northern Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
   Starting about 1800, the rulers of Zanzibar organized trading expeditions into the interior of the mainland, up to the various lakes in the continent's Great Rift Valley. They soon established permanent trade routes and Swahili speaking merchants settled in stops along the new trade routes. For the most part, this process didn't lead to genuine colonization. But colonisation 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.
   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 didn't do so in neighbouring Kenya, even though they made moves in that direction. The British and Germans both were keen to facilitate their rule over colonies with dozens of languages spoken by selecting a single local language that hopefully would be well accepted by the natives. 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 interterritorial conference was held 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.

Current situation

At the present time, some 90 percent of approximately 39 million Tanzanians speak Swahili. Kenya's population is comparable, but the prevalence of Swahili is lower, though still widespread. The five eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (to be subdivided in 2009) are Swahili speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese speak it; (External Link

) and it's starting to rival Lingala as the most important national language of that country. In Uganda, the Baganda generally don't speak Swahili, but it's 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 common only in market towns, among returning refugees, or near the borders of Kenya and Tanzania. Even so, Swahili possibly exceeds Hausa of West Africa as the sub-Saharan indigenous language with the greatest number of speakers, and Swahili speakers may number some ten to fifteen percent of the 750 million people of sub-Saharan Africa (2005 World Bank Data).(External Link

) Many of the world's institutions have responded to Kiswahili's growing prominence. It is one of the languages that feature in world radio stations such as The BBC, the Voice of America (USA), Radio Deutschewelle (Germany), Radio Moscow International (Russia), Ratio China International, Radio Sudan, and Radio South Africa.

In non-African popular culture

In Sid Meier's Civilization IV, a well known turn-based strategy computer game, the menu theme music is a rearrangement of the Lord's Prayer in Swahili, sharing the same name - "Baba Yetu" ("Our Father").
   In Michael Jackson's 1987 single "Liberian Girl" the repeated intro is the Swahili phrase "Nakupenda pia, nakutaka pia, mpenzi wee!" which translates "I love you too, and I want you too, you my love!"
   Disney's animated film The Lion King contains several Swahili references. "Simba", the main character's name, means lion (this is related to the Sanskrit word simha for "lion"), "Rafiki" means friend, and the name of the popular song "Hakuna Matata" means "there are no problems". In Scar's adopted son is called "Kovu", Swahili for "scar". Bungie Studios uses this language in some of its games (Halo 2).
Gene Roddenberry took the name of Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek from the Swahili word uhuru meaning "freedom".
   Also, the word Imzadi used in is derived from Swahili. It means "beloved".
   The Brooklyn-based Afro-beat band The Daktaris took their name from the Swahili word for "doctor", as did the 1960s US television show Daktari. Hatari, the Swahili word for "danger," is the name of a 1962 American movie.
   In Buffy the vampire Slayer, the first watchers spoke Swahili. (season 7)
   In The Simpsons Smithers speaks Swahili. Marge also lies on her resume saying that she speaks it.
   The subsidiary company of eBay kijiji meaning village.
   The Content Management System (CMS) Joomla means total. The right spelling would have been Jumla but the pronunciation remains the same.
   In the song Troublesome from Tupac Shakur he brings this rhyme "Screaming fuck all ya'll niggas in Swahili"

Further Information

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