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Swahili

Swahili

Summary

Swahili is natively spoken by about 10 million people, primarily in East Africa, where it is a lingua franca for diverse ethnic groups. It is integral to Swahili cultural identity, known for its role in regional trade, Bantu cultural influences, and traditional poetry and music. Written in the Latin alphabet, Swahili grammar features a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, extensive use of noun classes (genders), and a system of verb conjugations that indicate tense, aspect, and mood.

Stats

  • Language Family: Niger-Congo

  • Writing System: Latin

  • Writing System Type: Alphabet

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: N

  • Morphology: Agglutinative

  • Cases: 0

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 18

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 5

  • Word Order: SVO

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 5

  • Number of Consonants: 28

Areas Where Spoken

  • Kenya (official) (3.4%) (1.84 mil)

  • Rwanda (official) (2.1%) (289 k)

  • Tanzania (official) (8.8%) (5.76 mil)

  • Uganda (official) (4.4%) (2.08 mil)

Resources

Videos


Websites

  • BBC in Swahili : Looking something a bit more advanced? Try out your Swahili reading comprehension with the official BBC in Swahili\

  • East African Tube : A musical search engine where you can find music in Swahili and other East African languages.

  • Mwambao : A culture website that contains poems and culinary art

  • Learn Swahili101 : A Website used by a collection of universities to provide free study resources for introduction to Swahili

  • African Studies-Swahili : A Collection of sources to aid in pronunciation for the Swahili language and other African Languages.

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