Swahili language

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For other uses, see Swahili (disambiguation).
Native to Tanzania, DR Congo, Kenya, Mozambique (mostly Mwani), Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda,[1] Comoros, Mayotte and the margins of Zambia, Malawi, Madagascar and South Sudan
Native speakers
5 million (2007)[2] to 15 million (2012)[3]
150+ million speakers in total[4]
Latin script (Roman Swahili alphabet),
Arabic script (Arabic Swahili alphabet)
Swahili Braille
Official status
Official language in
Tanzania Tanzania
Kenya Kenya
Uganda Uganda
Democratic Republic of the Congo Democratic Republic of the Congo
Comoros Comoros
Zanzibar Zanzibar
African Union
East African Community
Language codes
ISO 639-1 sw
ISO 639-2 swa
ISO 639-3 swainclusive code
Individual codes:
swc – Congo Swahili
swh – Coastal Swahili
ymk – Makwe
wmw – Mwani
Glottolog swah1254[5]
G.40.A–H (pidgins & creoles)
Linguasphere 99-AUS-m
  Coastal areas where Swahili or Comorian is the indigenous language,
  official or national language,


Although only around five to fifteen million people speak Swahili as their first language, it is used as a lingua franca in much of Southeast Africa. Estimates of the total number of Swahili speakers vary widely, from 60 million to over 150 million.[8] Swahili serves as a national language of four nations: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shikomor, the official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is related to Swahili. Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and one of the official languages of the East African Community.

A significant fraction of Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic through contact with Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants of the Swahili Coast.[9] It has also incorporated German, Portuguese, English, Hindustani and French words into its vocabulary through contact with empire builders, traders and slavers during the past five centuries.




Swahili is traditionally regarded as being the language of coastal areas of Tanzania and Kenya. It was formalised after independence by presidents of the African Great Lakes region but first spoken by natives of the coastal mainland. It spread as a fisherman's language to the various islands surrounding the Swahili Coast. Traders from these islands had extensive contact with the coastal peoples from at least the 2nd century AD, and Swahili began to spread along the Swahili Coast from at least the 6th century. There is also cultural evidence of early Zaramo people settlement on Zanzibar from Dar-es-Salaam in present-day Tanzania.


Clove farmers from Oman[11] and the Persian Gulf farmed the Zanzibar Archipelago, slowly spreading Islam, adding a few words to Swahili and building forts and castles in major trading and cultural centers as far as Sofala (Mozambique) and Kilwa (Tanzania) to the south, Mombasa and Lamu in Kenya, the Comoros Islands and northern Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, and Barawa to the north in southern Somalia. Demand for cloves soon established permanent trade routes, and Swahili-speaking merchants settled in stops along the new trade routes. For the most part, this process started the development of the modern Swahili language. However, the spread was hampered during the European colonial era and did not occur west of Lake Malawi, in what was then called the Belgian Congo, and is now Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, making it a secondary rather than a primary language in that region.[citation needed]


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

Colonial period[edit]

After Germany attacked the region known as Tanganyika (present-day mainland Tanzania) for a colony in 1886, it took notice of the wide prevalence of Swahili and soon designated Swahili as a colony-wide official administrative language. The British did not do so in neighbouring Kenya even though they made moves in that direction. The British and Germans both sought to facilitate their rule over colonies where the inhabitants spoke dozens of different languages and so the colonial authorities selected a single local language, which they hoped the natives would find acceptable. Swahili was the only good candidate in the 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 that were 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 inter-territorial conference took place at Mombasa, at which the Zanzibar dialect, Kiunguja, was chosen to be the basis for standardizing Swahili.[13] 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 status[edit]

Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three African Great Lakes countries (Tanzania, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo) where it is an official or national language. The neighboring nation of Uganda made Swahili a required subject in primary schools in 1992 although this mandate has not been well implemented, and it declared it an official language in 2005 in preparation for the East African Federation. Swahili, or other closely related languages, is spoken by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, the Comoros, Rwanda, northern Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique.[14] and the language was still understood in the southern ports of the Red Sea and along the coasts of southern Arabia and the Persian Gulf in the twentieth century.[11][15]

Some 80 percent of approximately 49 million Tanzanians speak Swahili in addition to their first languages.[16] Many of the rising generation of Tanzania, however, speak Swahili as a primary language because of a decrease of the traditional cultures and the rise of a more unified culture in urban areas. Kenya's population is comparable as well, with a greater part of the nation being able to speak Swahili. Most educated Kenyans are able to communicate fluently in Swahili since it is a compulsory subject in school from grade one to high school and a distinct academic discipline in many of the public and private universities.

The five eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo are Swahili-speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese reportedly speak it,[17] and it is starting to rival Lingala as the most important national language of that country.

In Uganda, the Baganda and residents of Buganda generally do not speak Swahili, but it is in common use among the 25 million people elsewhere in the country and it is currently being taught in schools nationwide in preparation for the East African Community.

The usage of Swahili in other countries is commonly overstated and oswidespread only in market towns, among returning refugees or near the borders of Kenya and Tanzania. Even so, Swahili speakers may number some 120 to 150 million people.[18] Many of the world's institutions have responded to Swahili's growing prominence.

Methali (e.g. Haraka haraka haina baraka – Hurry hurry has no blessing),[19] i.e. "wordplay, risqué or suggestive puns and lyric rhyme, are deeply inscribed in Swahili culture, in form of Swahili parables, proverbs, and allegory".[20] Methali is uncovered globally within 'Swah' rap music. It provides the music with rich cultural, historical and local textures and insight.


Kiswahili is the Swahili word for the language and is also sometimes used in English. The name Swahili comes from the plural sawāḥil (سواحل) of the Arabic word sāḥil (ساحل), meaning "boundary" or "coast", used as an adjective meaning "coastal dwellers". With the prefix ki-, it means "coastal language", ki- being a prefix attached to nouns of the noun class such as languages.


Swahili is unusual among African languages in that it has lost the feature of lexical tone (with the exception of the numerically important Mvita dialect, the dialect of Kenya's second city, the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa).[clarification needed] Stress is on the penultimate syllable.


Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes: /ɑ/, /ɛ/, /i/, /ɔ/, and /u/. Pronunciation of /u/ is between International Phonetic Alphabet [u] and [o]. Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress, but they are pronounced in full as follows:

  • /ɑ/ is pronounced like the "u" in hut.
  • /ɛ/ is pronounced like the "e" in bed.
  • /i/ is pronounced like the "i" in ski.
  • /ɔ/ is pronounced like the "o" in or.

Swahili has no diphthongs; in vowel combinations, each vowel is pronounced separately so the Swahili word for "leopard", chui, is pronounced /tʃu.i/, as two syllables.


Labial Dental Alveolar Postalveolar
/ palatal
Velar Glottal
Stop prenasalized mb /ᵐb/   nd /ⁿd/ nj /ᶮɟ ~ ⁿdʒ/ ng /ᵑɡ/
implosive b /ɓ/ d /ɗ/ j /ʄ/ g /ɠ/
Fricative prenasalized mv /ᵐv/ nz /ⁿz/
Flap r /ɾ/


  • The nasal stops are pronounced as separate syllables when they appear before a heterorganic plosive (e.g. mtoto /m̩.ˈto.to/ 'child') or represent a separate morpheme (e.g. nilimpiga /ni.li..ˈpi.ɠa/ 'I hit him'), and prenasalized stops are decomposed into two syllables if the word would otherwise have one syllable: mbwa /ˈm̩.ɓwa/ 'dog', with an implosive b. However, that otherwise does not happen: ndizi ('banana') has two syllables, /ˈⁿdi.zi/, as does nenda /ˈne.ⁿda/ (not */ˈnen.ɗa/) 'go'.
  • The fricatives in parentheses (th dh kh gh) are borrowed from Arabic. Many Swahili speakers pronounce them as /s z h r/ respectively.
  • Swahili orthography does not distinguish aspirated from tenuis consonants. When nouns in the N-class begin with plosives, they are aspirated (tembo /ˈtembo/ 'palm wine', but tembo /ˈtʰembo/ 'elephant') in some dialects. Otherwise, aspirated consonants are not common. Some writers mark aspirated consonants with an apostrophe (t'embo).
  • Swahili l and r are merged for many speakers (the extent to which this is demonstrated generally depends on the original mother tongue spoken by the individual), and they are often both realized as alveolar lateral flap /ɺ/, a sound between a flapped r and an l.
  • After a nasal prefix, l/r becomes /d/, and w becomes /b/. (See fortition.)



Swahili is currently written in a slightly defective alphabet using the Latin script; the defectiveness comes in that it does not distinguish aspirated consonants, but in some dialects, pronunciation does not distinguish them anyway. (These were, however, distinguished as kh etc. in the old German colonial Latin alphabet.) There are two digraphs for native sounds, ch and sh; c is not used apart from unassimilated English loans and, occasionally, as a substitute for k in advertisements. There are also several digraphs for Arabic sounds not distinguished in pronunciation outside of traditional Swahili areas.


Vowel diacritics were generally written, effectively making the Swahili-Arabic script an abugida. /e/ and /i/, /o/ and /u/ were often conflated, but in some orthographic, /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, for example, in Persian and Urdu scripts. Instead, the closest Arabic sound is substituted. Not only that meant that one letter often stands for more than one sound but also writers made different choices on which consonant to substitute.Here are some of the equivalents between Arabic Swahili and Roman Swahili:

ا aa
ب b p mb mp bw pw mbw mpw
ت t nt
ث th?
ج j nj ng ng' ny
ح h
خ kh h
د d nd
ذ dh?
ر r d nd
ز z nz
س s
ش sh ch
ص s, sw
ض dhw
ط t tw chw
ظ z th dh dhw
ع ?
غ gh g ng ng'
ف f fy v vy mv p
ق k g ng ch sh ny
ل l
م m
ن n
ه h
و w
ي y ny




Noun classes [edit]

In common with all other Bantu languages, Swahili grammar arranges nouns into a number of classes. The ancestral system had 22 classes (counting singular and plural separately, according to the Meinhof convention), with most Bantu languages sharing at least ten. 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.

class semantics prefix singular translation plural translation
14 abstraction u- utoto childhood

Nouns beginning with m- in the singular and wa- in the plural denote animate beings, especially people: mtu, meaning 'person' (plural watu), mdudu, meaning 'insect' (plural wadudu). A class with m- in the singular but mi- in the plural often denotes plants: mti 'tree', miti trees. The infinitive of verbs begins with ku-: kusoma 'to read'. Other classes are more difficult to categorize. Singulars beginning in ki- take plurals in vi- and often refer to hand tools and other artefacts. The ki-/vi- alteration even applies to foreign words if the ki- was originally part of the root: vitabu "books" from kitabu "book" (from Arabic kitāb "book"; Arabic itself deals similarly with Alexandria). This class also contains languages (such as the name of the language Kiswahili) and diminutives, which was a separate class in earlier stages of Bantu. Words beginning with u- are often abstract, with no plural: utoto 'childhood'.


singular     plural
mtoto mmoja anasoma watoto wawili wanasoma
child one is reading children two are reading
One child is reading Two children are reading
kitabu kimoja kinatosha vitabu viwili vinatosha
book one suffices books two suffice
One book is enough Two books are enough
ndizi moja inatosha ndizi mbili zinatosha
banana one suffices bananas two suffice
One banana is enough Two bananas are enough


Semantic motivation[edit]



The other classes have foundations that may at first seem similarly counterintuitive.[22] In short,

  • Class 15 are verbal infinitives.

Verb affixation[edit]

Swahili verbs consist of a root and a number of affixes (mostly prefixes) that can be attached to express grammatical persons, tense, and subordinate clauses, which require a conjunction in languages such as English.


In most dictionaries, verbs are listed in their indicative root form, for example -kata meaning 'to cut/chop'. In a simple sentence, prefixes for grammatical tense and person are added, as ninakata 'I cut'. Here, ni- means 'I', and na- indicates a specific time (present tense unless stated otherwise).

Verb conjugation[edit]

ni- -na- kata
1sg DEF. TIME cut/chop
'I am cutting (it)'

This sentence can be modified either by changing the subject prefix or the tense prefix:

u- -na- kata
2sg DEF. TIME cut/chop
'You are cutting'
u- -me- kata
2sg PERFECT cut/chop
'You have cut'


Person Sg. Pl.
1st ni- tu-
2nd u- m-
3rd a- wa-
Person Sg. Pl.
1st -ni- -tu-
2nd -ku- -wa- (-mu-)
3rd -m- -wa-


The most common tense prefixes are these:

Tense and mood prefixes
-a- gnomic (indefinite time)
-na- definite time (often present progressive)
-me- perfect
-li- past
-ta- future
hu- habitual (does not take subject prefix)
-ki- conditional

The indefinite (gnomic tense) prefix is used for generic statements such as "birds fly", and the vowels of the subject prefixes are assimilated. Thus, nasoma means 'I read', although colloquially, it is also short for ninasoma.

Persons in gnomic tense
1st na- twa-
2nd wa- mwa-
3rd a- wa-
na- soma
1sg:GNOM read
'I read'
mwa- soma
2pl:GNOM read
'You (pl) read'




A third prefix is the object prefix. It is placed just before the root and refers a particular object, either a person or rather as "the" does in English:

a- na- mw- ona
3sg DEF.T. 3sg.OBJ see
ni- na- mw- ona mtoto
1sg DEF.T. 3sg.OBJ see child
'I (am) see(ing) the child'


si- som- -i
1sg.NEG:PRES read NEG
'I am not reading/ I don't read'

Other instances of this change of the final vowel include the subjunctive in -e. That goes only for Bantu verbs ending with -a; Arabic-derived verbs do not change their final vowel.


wa- na- pig -w -a
'They are being hit'




Swahili noun-class concord
NC Semantic
-C, -V
Subj. Obj -a Adjective
-C, -i, -e[* 1]
9 animals, 'other',
10 zi- za
or u-, wi-, we-
  2. ^ In a few verbs: kwenda, kwisha

Dialects and closely related languages[edit]

This list is based Swahili and Sabaki: a linguistic history.



Old dialects[edit]

Maho (2009) considers these to be distinct languages:

  • Socotra Swahili (extinct)
  • Sidi, in Gujarat (extinct)


  • Mombasa–Lamu Swahili
    • Lamu
      • Kipate is local dialect of Pate Island, considered to be closest to the original dialect of Kingozi.
    • Mombasa
      • Chijomvu is a subdialect of the Mombasa area.
      • Kingare is the subdialect of the Mombasa area.
    • Mambrui, Malindi
    • Chichifundi, a dialect of the southern Kenya coast.
    • Chwaka
    • Kivumba, a dialect of the southern Kenya coast.
    • Nosse Be (Madagascar)
  • Pemba Swahili
    • Kipemba is a local dialect of the Pemba Island.
    • Makunduchi
    • Mafia, Mbwera
    • Kilwa (extinct)

Maho includes the various Comorian dialects as a third group. Other authorities consider Comorian to be a Sabaki language, distinct from Swahili.[citation needed]

Historically recent varieties[edit]

  • Shaba Swahili (Katanga Swahili, Lubumbashi Swahili) is sometimes called Copperbelt Swahili.
  • Sheng is a street patois that blends Swahili, English, and ethnic languages spoken in and around Nairobi. Originating in the Nairobi slums, it is considered fashionable and cosmopolitan in a growing segment of the population.
  • Engsh
  • Asian Swahili (Kibabu) and Cutchi-Swahili
  • Kisetla (Settler Swahili)
  • Kikeya

Other regions[edit]

In Somalia, where the Afro-Asiatic Somali language predominates, a variant of Swahili referred to as Chimwiini (also known as Chimbalazi) is spoken along the Benadir coast by the Bravanese people.[25] Another Swahili dialect known as Kibajuni also serves as the mother tongue of the Bajuni minority ethnic group, which lives in the tiny Bajuni Islands as well as the southern Kismayo region.[25][26]

In Oman, an estimated 22,000 people speak Swahili.[27] Most are descendants of those repatriated after the fall of the Sultanate of Zanzibar.[28][29]

See also[edit]


  3. ^ Swahili at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Congo Swahili at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Coastal Swahili at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Makwe at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Mwani at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  4. ^ "HOME - Home". Swahililanguage.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2015-11-15. 
  7. ^ Prins 1961
  10. ^ "Baba yetu". Wikisource. Retrieved 2015-11-15. 
  13. ^ Whiteley 1969: 80
  14. ^ Nurse & Thomas Spear (1985) The Swahili
  16. ^ Brock-Utne 2001: 123
  18. ^ (2005 World Bank Data).
  19. ^ Swahili proverbs Kishwahili.net, retrieved 10 March 2013
  21. ^ Jan Knappert (1971) Swahili Islamic poetry, Volume 1
  22. ^ See Contini-Morava for details.
  23. ^ Kamil Ud Deen, 2005. The acquisition of Swahili.
  24. ^ H.E.Lambert 1956, 1957, 1958



External links[edit]