سواحيلي (لغة)

Swahili
Ajami: كِيْسَوَاحِيْلِيْ KiSwahili
النطق	قالب:IPA-sw
موطنها	mainly in Tanzania and Kenya, Comoros, Mayotte, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Bajuni Islands (part of Somalia), northern Mozambique (mostly Mwani), Zambia, Malawi, and Madagascar.
العرق	Swahili
الناطقون الأصليون	Estimates range from 2 million (2003) to 18 million (2012)e21 L2 speakers: 90 million (1991–2015)
عائلة اللغات	النيجر-الكونغو Atlantic–Congo Volta-Congo Benue–Congo Bantoid Southern Bantoid Bantu Northeast Bantu Northeast Coast Bantu Sabaki Swahili
الصيغة المبكرة	Proto-Swahili
نظام الكتابة	Latin script (Roman Swahili alphabet) Arabic script (Arabic Swahili alphabet) Swahili Braille
الوضع الرسمي
لغة رسمية في	4 countries تنزانيا رواندا كنيا أوغندا Organizations African Union East African Community قالب:Country data SADC Southern African Development Community
لغة أقلية معترف بها في	بوروندي الكونغو الديمقراطية موزمبيق
ينظمها	Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (Tanzania) Chama cha Kiswahili cha Taifa (Kenya)
أكواد اللغات
ISO 639-2	swa
ISO 639-2	swa
ISO 639-3	swa – inclusive code Individual codes: swc – Congo Swahili swh – Coastal Swahili ymk – Makwe (?) wmw – Mwani (?)
Glottolog	swah1254
Guthrie code	G.42–43; G.40.A–H (pidgins & creoles)
Linguasphere	99-AUS-m
Geographic-administrative extent of Swahili. Dark: native range (the Swahili coast). Medium green: official use. Light green: no official or national language status.

الشخص	Mswahili
الشعب	Waswahili
اللغة	Kiswahili

سواحيلي هي لغة سواحل إفريقيا الشرقية، وهي لغة كينيا وتانزانيا الرسمية. إنها لغة الأم لخمس مليون نسمة، وخمسون مليون تعلموها. وهي من لغات البانتو، لكن أثرت عليها العربية كثيرا. تكتب بالحروف اللاتينية الآن، لكن كانت تكتب بالحروف العربية من قبل.

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 History

Swahili in Arabic script—memorial plate at the Askari Monument, Dar es Salaam (1927)

 Etymology

The origin of the word Swahili is its phonetic equivalent in Arabic:

سَاحِل	→	سَوَاحِل	→	سَوَاحِلِىّ
sāħil		sawāħil		sawāħilï
"coast"		"coasts", (broken plural)		"of coasts"

 Origin

The core of the Swahili language originates in Bantu languages of the coast of East Africa. Much of Swahili's Bantu vocabulary has cognates in the Pokomo, Taita, and Mijikenda languages and, to a lesser extent, other East African Bantu languages. While opinions vary on the specifics, it has been historically purported that about 20% of the Swahili vocabulary is derived from loan words, the vast majority Arabic, but also other contributing languages, including Persian, Hindustani, Portuguese, and Malay.

Source languages for loanwords in Swahili

Source languages	Percentage
Arabic (mainly Omani Arabic)	35%
English	4.6%
Portuguese	0.9–1.0%
Hindi	0.7–3.9%
Persian	0.4–3.4%
Malagasy	0.2–0.4%

Omani Arabic is the source of most Arabic loanwords in Swahili. In the text "Early Swahili History Reconsidered", however, Thomas Spear noted that Swahili retains a large amount of grammar, vocabulary, and sounds inherited from the Sabaki language. In fact, while taking account of daily vocabulary, using lists of one hundred words, 72–91% were inherited from the Sabaki language (which is reported as a parent language) whereas 4–17% were loan words from other African languages. Only 2–8% were from non-African languages, and Arabic loan words constituted a fraction of that. According to other sources, around 35% of the Swahili vocabulary comes from Arabic. What also remained unconsidered was that a good number of the borrowed terms had native equivalents. The preferred use of Arabic loan words is prevalent along the coast, where natives, in a cultural show of proximity to, or descent from Arab culture, would rather use loan words, whereas the natives in the interior tend to use the native equivalents. It was originally written in Arabic script.

The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa, Tanzania, in 1711 in the Arabic script that were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. The original letters are preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India.

 Colonial period

Although originally written with the Arabic script, Swahili is now written in a Latin alphabet introduced by Christian missionaries and colonial administrators. The text shown here is the Catholic version of the Lord's Prayer.

Various colonial powers that ruled on the coast of East Africa played a role in the growth and spread of Swahili. With the arrival of the Arabs in East Africa, they used Swahili as a language of trade as well as for teaching Islam to the local Bantu peoples. This resulted in Swahili first being written in the Arabic alphabet. The later contact with the Portuguese resulted in the increase of vocabulary of the Swahili language. The language was formalised in an institutional level when the Germans took over after the Berlin conference. After seeing there was already a widespread language, the Germans formalised it as the official language to be used in schools. Thus schools in Swahili are called Shule (from German Schule) in government, trade and the court system. With the Germans controlling the major Swahili-speaking region in East Africa, they changed the alphabet system from Arabic to Latin. After the First World War, Britain took over German East Africa, where they found Swahili rooted in most areas, not just the coastal regions. The British decided to formalise it as the language to be used across the East African region (although in British East Africa [Kenya and Uganda] most areas used English and various Nilotic and other Bantu languages while Swahili was mostly restricted to the coast). In June 1928, an inter-territorial conference attended by representatives of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar took place in Mombasa. The Zanzibar dialect was chosen as standard Swahili for those areas, and the standard orthography for Swahili was adopted.

 Current status

Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in four African Great Lakes countries (Kenya, DRC, Uganda, and Tanzania), where it is an official or national language, while being the first language for many people in Tanzania especially in the coastal regions of Tanga, Pwani, Dar es Salaam, Mtwara and Lindi. In the inner regions of Tanzania, Swahili is spoken with an accent influenced by local languages and dialects, and as a first language for most people born in the cities, whilst being spoken as a second language in rural areas. Swahili and closely related languages are spoken by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Comoros, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Rwanda. The language was still understood in the southern ports of the Red Sea in the 20th century. Swahili speakers may number 150 to 200 million in total. The East African Community created an institution called the East African Kiswahili Commission (EACK) which began operations in 2015. The institution currently serves as the leading body for promoting the language in the East African region, as well as for coordinating its development and usage for regional integration and sustainable development.

Swahili is among the first languages in Africa for which language technology applications have been developed. Arvi Hurskainen is one of the early developers. The applications include a spelling checker, part-of-speech tagging, a language learning software, an analysed Swahili text corpus of 25 million words, an electronic dictionary, and machine translation between Swahili and English. The development of language technology also strengthens the position of Swahili as a modern medium of communication. Furthermore, Swahili Wikipedia is among the few Wikipedias in African language featuring a fairly good amount of contributors and articles.

 Tanzania

The widespread use of Swahili as a national language in Tanzania came after Tanganyika gained independence in 1961 and the government decided that it would be used as a language to unify the new nation. This saw the use of Swahili in all levels of government, trade, art as well as schools in which primary school children are taught in Swahili, before switching to English (medium of instruction) in Secondary schools (although Swahili is still taught as an independent subject). After Tanganyika and Zanzibar unification in 1964, Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili (TUKI, Institute of Swahili Research) was created from the Interterritorial Language Committee. In 1970 TUKI was merged with the University of Dar es salaam, while Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (BAKITA) was formed. BAKITA is an organisation dedicated to the development and advocacy of Swahili as a means of national integration in Tanzania. Key activities mandated for the organization include creating a healthy atmosphere for the development of Swahili, encouraging use of the language in government and business functions, coordinating activities of other organizations involved with Swahili, standardizing the language. BAKITA vision are: 1.To efficiently manage and coordinate the development and use of Kiswahili in Tanzania 2.To participate fully and effectively in promoting Swahili in East Africa, Africa and the entire world over. Although other bodies and agencies can propose new vocabularies, BAKITA is the only organisation that can approve its usage in the Swahili language.

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 Kenya

In Kenya, Kiswahili has been the national language since 1964 and is official since 2010. Chama cha Kiswahili cha Taifa (CHAKITA) was established in 1998 to research and promote Kiswahili language in Kenya. Kiswahili is a compulsory subject in all Kenyan primary and secondary schools.

 Uganda

Uganda adopted Kiswahili as the official language in 2022 and also made it compulsory across primary and secondary schools in the country.

 Somalia

The Swahili language is not widespread in Somalia and has no official status nationally or regionally. It is rarely taught in the education system, the main foreign languages are Arabic and English. Dialects of Swahili are spoken by some ethnic minorities on the Bajuni islands in the form of Kibajuni on the southern tip of the country and in the town of Brava in the form of Chimwiini, both contain a significant amount of Somali and Italian loanwords. Standard Swahili is generally only spoken by Somali nationals who have resided in Kenya and subsequently returned to Somalia. Lastly, a closely related language Mushunguli (also known as Zigula, Zigua, or Chizigua) is spoken by some of the Somali Bantu ethnic minority mostly living in the Jubba Valley. It is classified as a Northeast Coast Bantu language as Swahili is and has some intelligibility with Swahili.

 Religious and political identity

 Religion

Swahili played a major role in spreading both Christianity and Islam in East Africa. From their arrival in East Africa, Arabs brought Islam and set up madrasas, where they used Swahili to teach Islam to the natives. As the Arab presence grew, more and more natives were converted to Islam and were taught using the Swahili language.

From the arrival of Europeans in East Africa, Christianity was introduced in East Africa. While the Arabs were mostly based in the coastal areas, European missionaries went further inland spreading Christianity. But since the first missionary posts in East Africa were in the coastal areas, missionaries picked up Swahili and used it to spread Christianity since it had a lot of similarities with many of the other indigenous languages in the region.

 Politics

During the struggle for Tanganyika independence, the Tanganyika African National Union used Swahili as language of mass organisation and political movement. This included publishing pamphlets and radio broadcasts to rally the people to fight for independence. After independence, Swahili was adopted as the national language of the nation. Till this day, Tanzanians carry a sense of pride when it comes to Swahili especially when it is used to unite over 120 tribes across Tanzania. Swahili was used to strengthen solidarity among the people and a sense of togetherness and for that Swahili remains a key identity of the Tanzanian people.

 Phonology

Example of spoken Swahili

 Vowels

Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes: /ɑ/, /ɛ/, /i/, /ɔ/, and /u/. According to Ellen Contini-Morava, vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress. However, according to Edgar Polomé, these five phonemes can vary in pronunciation. Polomé claims that /ɛ/, /i/, /ɔ/, and /u/ are pronounced as such only in stressed syllables. In unstressed syllables, as well as before a prenasalized consonant, they are pronounced as [e], [ɪ], [o], and [ʊ]. E is also commonly pronounced as mid-position after w. Polomé claims that /ɑ/ is pronounced as such only after w and is pronounced as [a] in other situations, especially after /j/ (y). A can be pronounced as [ə] in word-final position. Swahili vowels can be long; these are written as two vowels (example: kondoo, meaning "sheep"). This is due to a historical process in which the L became deleted between the second last and last vowel of a word ( e.g.kondoo "sheep" was originally pronounced kondolo, which survives in certain dialects). However, these long vowels are not considered to be phonemic. A similar process exists in Zulu.

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 Consonants

Swahili consonant phonemes

		Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar / Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m ⟨m⟩		n ⟨n⟩	ɲ ⟨ny⟩	ŋ ⟨ng'⟩
Stop	prenasalized	mb̥ ⟨mb⟩		nd̥ ⟨nd⟩	nd̥ʒ̊ ⟨nj⟩	ŋɡ̊ ⟨ng⟩
	implosive / voiced	ɓ ~ b ⟨b⟩		ɗ ~ d ⟨d⟩	ʄ ~ dʒ ⟨j⟩	ɠ ~ ɡ ⟨g⟩
	voiceless	p ⟨p⟩		t ⟨t⟩	tʃ ⟨ch⟩	k ⟨k⟩
	aspirated	(pʰ ⟨p⟩)		(tʰ ⟨t⟩)	(tʃʰ ⟨ch⟩)	(kʰ ⟨k⟩)
Fricative	prenasalized	mv̥ ⟨mv⟩		nz̥ ⟨nz⟩
	voiced	v ⟨v⟩	(ð ⟨dh⟩)	z ⟨z⟩		(ɣ ⟨gh⟩)
	voiceless	f ⟨f⟩	(θ ⟨th⟩)	s ⟨s⟩	ʃ ⟨sh⟩	(x ⟨kh⟩)	h ⟨h⟩
Approximant				l ⟨l⟩	j ⟨y⟩	w ⟨w⟩
Rhotic				r ⟨r⟩

Some dialects of Swahili may also have the aspirated phonemes /pʰ tʰ tʃʰ kʰ bʱ dʱ dʒʱ ɡʱ/ though they are unmarked in Swahili's orthography. Multiple studies favour classifying prenasalization as consonant clusters, not as separate phonemes. Historically, nasalization has been lost before voiceless consonants, and subsequently the voiced consonants have devoiced, though they are still written mb, nd etc. The /r/ phoneme is realised as either a short trill قالب:IPA blink or more commonly as a single tap قالب:IPA blink by most speakers. [x] exists in free variation with h, and is only distinguished by some speakers. In some Arabic loans (nouns, verbs, adjectives), emphasis or intensity is expressed by reproducing the original emphatic consonants /dˤ, sˤ, tˤ, zˤ/ and the uvular /q/, or lengthening a vowel, where aspiration would be used in inherited Bantu words.

 Orthography

Swahili in Arabic script on the clothes of a girl in German East Africa (ca. early 1900s)

Swahili is now written in the Latin alphabet. There are a few digraphs for native sounds, ch, sh, ng and ny; q and x are not used, c is not used apart from the digraph ch, unassimilated English loans and, occasionally, as a substitute for k in advertisements. There are also several digraphs for Arabic sounds, which many speakers outside of ethnic Swahili areas have trouble differentiating.

The language used to be written in the Ajami script, which is an Arabic script. Unlike other adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages, relatively little accommodation was made for Swahili. There were also differences in orthographic conventions between cities and authors and over the centuries, some quite precise but others different enough to cause difficulties with intelligibility.

/e/ and /i/, and /o/ and /u/ were often conflated, but in some spellings, /e/ was distinguished from /i/ by rotating the kasra 90° and /o/ was distinguished from /u/ by writing the damma backwards.

Several Swahili consonants do not have equivalents in Arabic, and for them, often no special letters were created unlike other languages. Instead, the closest Arabic sound is substituted. Not only did that mean that one letter often stands for more than one sound, but also writers made different choices of which consonant to substitute. Below are some of the equivalents between Arabic Swahili and Roman Swahili:

Swahili in Arabic Script				Swahili in Latin Alphabet
Final	Medial	Initial	Isolated
ـا		ا		aa
ـب	ـبـ	بـ	ب	b p mb mp bw pw mbw mpw
ـت	ـتـ	تـ	ت	t nt
ـث	ـثـ	ثـ	ث	th?
ـج	ـجـ	جـ	ج	j nj ng ng' ny
ـح	ـحـ	حـ	ح	h
ـخ	ـخـ	خـ	خ	kh h
ـد		د		d nd
ـذ		ذ		dh?
ـر		ر		r d nd
ـز		ز		z nz
ـس	ـسـ	سـ	س	s
ـش	ـشـ	شـ	ش	sh ch
ـص	ـصـ	صـ	ص	s, sw
ـض	ـضـ	ضـ	ض	dhw
ـط	ـطـ	طـ	ط	t tw chw
ـظ	ـظـ	ظـ	ظ	z th dh dhw
ـع	ـعـ	عـ	ع	?
ـغ	ـغـ	غـ	غ	gh g ng ng'
ـف	ـفـ	فـ	ف	f fy v vy mv p
ـق	ـقـ	قـ	ق	k g ng ch sh ny
ـك	ـكـ	كـ	ك
ـل	ـلـ	لـ	ل	l
ـم	ـمـ	مـ	م	m
ـن	ـنـ	نـ	ن	n
ـه	ـهـ	هـ	ه	h
ـو		و		w
ـي	ـيـ	يـ	ي	y ny

That was the general situation, but conventions from Urdu were adopted by some authors so as to distinguish aspiration and /p/ from /b/: پھا /pʰaa/ 'gazelle', پا /paa/ 'roof'. Although it is not found in Standard Swahili today, there is a distinction between dental and alveolar consonants in some dialects, which is reflected in some orthographies, for example in كُٹَ -kuta 'to meet' vs. كُتَ -kut̠a 'to be satisfied'. A k with the dots of y, ـػـػـػـػ, was used for ch in some conventions; ky being historically and even contemporaneously a more accurate transcription than Roman ch. In Mombasa, it was common to use the Arabic emphatics for Cw, for example in صِصِ swiswi (standard sisi) 'we' and كِطَ kit̠wa (standard kichwa) 'head'.

Particles such as ya, na, si, kwa, ni are joined to the following noun, and possessives such as yangu and yako are joined to the preceding noun, but verbs are written as two words, with the subject and tense–aspect–mood morphemes separated from the object and root, as in aliyeniambia "he who told me".

 Swahili sayings

Loxodonta africana elephants frolic in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, 2012.

Two sayings with the same meaning of Where elephants fight, the grass is trampled:

Wapiganapo

tembo

nyasi

huumia

Wapiganapo tembo nyasi huumia

Fighting elephants damage the grass.

Ndovu

wawili

wakisongana,

ziumiazo

ni

nyika.

Ndovu wawili wakisongana, ziumiazo ni nyika.

Where two elephants argue, the grassland is damaged.

Mwacha

mila

ni

mtumwa.

Mwacha mila ni mtumwa.

The person who abandons his culture, is a servant.

 See also

• Mandombe script
• Swahili literature
• UCLA Language Materials Project
• Languages of Africa

 References

 Sources

• Ashton, E. O. 1947. Swahili Grammar: Including intonation. Essex: Longman House. ISBN 0-582-62701-X.
• Irele, Abiola and Biodun Jeyifo. 2010. The Oxford encyclopedia of African thought, Volume 1. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-533473-6
• Blommaert, Jan. 2003. Situating Language Rights: English and Swahili in Tanzania Revisited Archived 9 يونيو 2007 at the Wayback Machine (sociolinguistic developments in Tanzanian Swahili) – Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, paper 23, Ghent University.
• Brock-Utne, Birgit. 2001. "Education for All – in Whose Language?" Oxford Review of Education, 27(1): 115–134. doi:10.1080/03054980125577. S2CID 144457326.
• Chiraghdin, Shihabuddin and Mathias E. Mnyampala. 1977. Historia ya Kiswahili. Oxford University Press. Eastern Africa.ISBN 0-19-572367-8
• Contini-Morava, Ellen. 1994. Noun Classification in Swahili.
• Lambert, H.E. 1956. Chi-Chifundi: A Dialect of the Southern Kenya Coast. (Kampala)
• Lambert, H.E. 1957. Ki-Vumba: A Dialect of the Southern Kenya Coast. (Kampala)
• Lambert, H.E. 1958. Chi-Jomvu and ki-Ngare: Subdialects of the Mombasa Area. (Kampala)
• Marshad, Hassan A. Kiswahili au Kiingereza (Nchini Kenya). Jomo Kenyatta Foundation. Nairobi 1993. ISBN 9966-22-098-4.
• Mugane, John A. 2015. The Story of Swahili. Athenns, OH: Ohio University Press. ISBN 978-0-89680-293-3.
• Nurse, Derek, and Hinnebusch, Thomas J. Swahili and Sabaki: a linguistic history. 1993. Series: University of California Publications in Linguistics, v. 121.
• Ogechi, Nathan Oyori: "On language rights in Kenya (on the legal position of Swahili in Kenya)", in: Nordic Journal of African Studies 12(3): 277–295 (2003)
• Prins, A.H.J. 1961. "The Swahili-Speaking Peoples of Zanzibar and the East African Coast (Arabs, Shirazi and Swahili)". Ethnographic Survey of Africa, edited by Daryll Forde. London: International African Institute.
• Prins, A.H.J. 1970. A Swahili Nautical Dictionary. Preliminary Studies in Swahili Lexicon – 1. Dar es Salaam.
• Sakai, Yuko. 2020. Swahili Syntax Tree Diagram: Based on Universal Sentence Structure. Createspace. ISBN 978-1696306461
• Whiteley, Wilfred. 1969. Swahili: the rise of a national language. London: Methuen. Series: Studies in African History.

 وصلات خارجية

• UCLA report on Swahili
• John Ogwana (2001) Swahili Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Factors of Its Development and Expansion
• List of Swahili Dictionaries
• Arthur Cornwallis Madan (1902). English-Swahili dictionary. Clarendon Press. p. 555. Archived from the original on 14 October 2018. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
• Erickson, Helen; Gustafsson, Marianne (1989). Kiswahili Grammar Notes. Retrieved 21 December 2021.