SWAHILI, also Kiswahili, KiSwahili. A
BANTU language spoken as a mother tongue or a second language in the East African mainland and islands, from Lamu Island in
KENYA in the north to the southern border of
TANZANIA, and west to Congo. It may have arisen from a Bantu language pidginized through contact with
ARABIC. As a language of trade, it spread inland from the coast during the 19c. It is the official language of Kenya and Tanzania and a
LINGUA FRANCA in
UGANDA and Grgo (Zaire). Arabic has provided many
LOANWORDS, and the earliest Swahili literature, from the 18c, is in Arabic script. The British colonial administration in the 1930s encouraged the development of
STANDARD Swahili. Swahili nouns are divided into classes according to the grammatical prefixes they take. Such
PREFIXES also bring verbs, adjectives, demonstratives, and possessives into concord with the subject of a sentence: for example, in
Watu wetu wale wakubwa wamekuja (Those big people of ours have come),
watu is the plural of
mtu (person), and other words harmonize by beginning with
wa. Comparably,
mbenzi is a rich person (who owns a Mercedes-Benz), plural
wabenzi. Swahili is one of the few indigenous African rivals to English. Because it is used over such a wide area, it tends to be ethnically neutral. See
AFRICAN ENGLISH,
EAST AFRICAN ENGLISH, WORD.
