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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 ] Estimates of the number of Swahili speakers, including both native and second-language speakers, vary widely ...
Kiswahili served as coastal East Africa's lingua franca and trade language from the ninth century onward. Zanzibari traders' intensive push into the African interior from the late eighteenth century induced the adoption of Swahili as a common language throughout much of East Africa. Thus, Kiswahili is the most spoken African language, used by ...
Swahili culture is the culture of the Swahili people inhabiting the Swahili coast. This littoral area encompasses Tanzania, Kenya, and Mozambique, as well as the adjacent islands of Zanzibar and Comoros along with some parts of Malawi and the eastern part of Democratic Republic of Congo. Swahili people speak Swahili as their native language ...
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 ...
The Bantu Swahili language written in the Arabic script on the clothes of a Tanzanian woman (early 1900s). According to Ethnologue, there are a total of 126 languages spoken in Tanzania. Two are institutional, 18 are developing, 58 are vigorous, 40 are endangered, and 8 are dying. There are also three languages that recently became extinct. [2]
Major Horn of Africa languages are Somali, Amharic and Oromo. Lingala is important in Central Africa. Important South African languages are Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga, Swazi, Southern Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans. [ 36 ] French, English, and Portuguese are important languages in Africa due to colonialism.
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.
On 20 June 2009, the Swahili Wikipedia gave its main page a makeover. As of August 2024, it has about 82,000 articles, making it the 83rd-largest Wikipedia. [ 4] The Swahili Wikipedia is the second most popular Wikipedia in Tanzania and Kenya after the English version with respectively 14% and 4% of the visits, as of January 2021.