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Swahili, also known by its local name Kiswahili, is a Bantu language originally spoken by the Swahili people, who are found primarily in Tanzania, Kenya, and Mozambique (along the East African coast and adjacent littoral islands). [6]
Standard Swahili language arose during the colonial era as the homogenised version of the dominant dialects of the Swahili language.. Standard Swahili enabled communication in a wide array of situations: it facilitated political cooperation between anti-apartheid fighters from South Africa and their Tanzanian military instructors and continues to give members of the African American community ...
Swahili people speak the Swahili language. Modern Standard Swahili is derived from the Kiunguja dialect of Zanzibar. Like many other world languages, Swahili has borrowed a large number of words from foreign languages, particularly administrative terms from Arabic, but also words from Portuguese, Persian, Hindi, Spanish, English and German.
Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognized language. It is peer to the few languages of the world that ...
Swahili may refer to: Swahili language, a Bantu language officially used in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda and widely spoken in the African Great Lakes. Swahili people, an ethnic group in East Africa. Swahili culture, the culture of the Swahili people. Swahili coast, a littoral region in East Africa.
Swahili may be described in several ways depending on the aspect being considered. It is an agglutinative language. It constructs whole words by joining together discrete roots and morphemes with specific meanings, and may also modify words by similar processes. Its basic word order is SVO. However, because the verb is inflected to indicate the ...
The most widely spoken Bantu language by number of speakers is Swahili, with 16 million native speakers and 80 million L2 speakers (2015). [7] Most native speakers of Swahili live in Tanzania , where it is a national language, while as a second language, it is taught as a mandatory subject in many schools in East Africa, and is a lingua franca ...
Swahili is a Bantu language with heavy influence from Arabic with the word "Swahili" itself descending from the Arabic word "sahil," meaning "coast"; "Swahili" meaning "people of the coast." [ 4 ] [ 41 ] Some hold that Swahili is a completely Bantu language with only a few Arabic loanwords , while others suggest that Bantu and Arabic mixed to ...