Swahili, also called Kiswahili, is a Bantu language of the Niger-Congo family that developed along the East African coast through centuries of contact between Bantu-speaking communities and Arabic-speaking traders, absorbing a substantial layer of Arabic vocabulary in the process. It functions today as a lingua franca across Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and neighboring countries and as an official language of the African Union, and, unusually for a Bantu language, is the primary language of a very large population who use it as a learned second rather than first language, which is the source of the wide disagreement over its total speaker numbers.
Facts
Disputed
Speaker CountSources diverge sharply on what is being counted. Ethnologues figure of roughly 16 million counts first-language speakers only; other widely cited estimates put total speakers, overwhelmingly second-language users of Swahili as an East African lingua franca, at well over 100 million, with some estimates as high as 200 million. There is no real dispute that Swahili has vastly more second-language than first-language speakers, only over how to weight that population in a single headline number. ISO 639-3 Code Attested From (Year)Earliest known documents written in Swahili: letters written in Kilwa, Tanzania, in 1711 in the Arabic script. RegionTanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Bajuni Islands and Brava, southern Somalia 3 Classification
Official Status Swahili
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Associated With
This source names Arabic directly: "between Bantu-speaking communities and Arabic-speaking traders, absorbing a substantial layer of Arabic vocabulary in the process."
Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)
In Family
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)
Written In
Latin Script, Scripts Swahili was earlier written in an Arabic-derived script known as Ajami; Latin-script orthography became standard under European colonial administration and is now near universal.
Source Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages
Sources
1. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
David Crystal (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2010Official status, Swahili entity page
It functions today as a lingua franca across Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and neighboring countries and as an official language of the African Union, and, unusually for a Bantu language, is the primary language of a very large population who use it as a learned second rather than first language, which is the source of the wide disagreement over its total speaker numbers.
- In Family: Niger-Congo
2. Ethnologue: Languages of the World
3. Wikipedia: Swahili Language
Wikipediainfobox
Lugha ya Kiswahili
Quote
The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa, Tanzania, in 1711 in the Arabic script
View the Source Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages
Encyclopaedia Britannica
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