We all know those “it” girls that seem to gather followers wherever they go. Among East African languages, Swahili is the queen bee. It’s even called the lingua franca of East Africa with a whopping 60-150 million estimated speakers.
How did Swahili become so popular? It started in the 1960s when Swahili was used by freedom fighters across regions and enabled them to unite together through a common language. Then Tanzania became the first country to adopt Swahili as the official language in 1961. This was groundbreaking since it was only one of two countries to make an indigenous language the official language at that time.
Thanks to Disney, most people know the Swahili words for lion, friend and “no-problem philosophy” which are Simba, Rafiki, and Hakuna Matata respectively! The term Kwanzaa comes from the Swahili word ku-anza (first), and the holiday celebrates the matunda ya kwanza or “first fruits”.
Here are some more Swahili words:
- Jambo (Hello)
- Kwa heri (Goodbye to one person) and Kwa herini (Goodbye to group)
- Asante (Thank you)
- Ndiyo (Yes)
Fun fact: President Nyerere of Tanzania translated three Shakespeare plays into Swahili (Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and Julius Caesar) during his efforts to make it a symbol of political unity and independence.
Here is a quick rundown on some linguistic aspects of Swahili:
- It’s an agglutinative language, like Turkish or Hungarian, so it combines morphemes into one word but still recognizes the morphemes as individual units and doesn’t change them.
- Swahili uses SVO (subject-verb-object) order like English.
- The final syllable of a word is usually a vowel.
- It has implosive sounds, which are like plosive sounds (sounds made by releasing air quickly, such as the “p” in “pan”), but instead of releasing air you inhale it.
English has borrowed a few words from Swahili such as “safari” or “Jenga”, which was named after the Swahili word kujenga meaning to build or construct.
Swahili has stayed true to its roots despite the fame. While some linguists believe that lingua franca languages become less complex as more people learn them, a recent case study proves that Swahili has not lost any linguistic complexity. Researchers compared Swahili to five other Bantu languages by looking at features such as vowel inventory and morpheme reduction. Not only is Swahili overall just as complex, but it even has more complicated grammar than some of the other languages.
Kwa herini! Goodbye!
Read More:
Mugane, John. “The story of how Swahili became Africa’s most spoken language.” The Conversation, 20 February 2022. Available at: https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-how-swahili-became-africas-most-spoken-language-177259#:~:text=During%20the%20decades%20leading%20up,their%20native%20languages%20varied%20widely
Jerro, Kyle. “Linguistic complexity: A case study from Swahili.” African linguistics on the prairie: Selected papers from the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, 2018, pp. 3-21, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1219141. Available at: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/28289/1/1001673.pdf#page=13.
“Swahili.” Must Go Travel. Available at: https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/swahili/.