Spoken almost exclusively in the Comoros Islands
The Comoro Islands or Comoros form an archipelago of volcanic islands situated off the south-east coast of Africa, to the east of Mozambique and north-west of Madagascar. The islands are politically divided between Union of the Comoros and two territories of France: the depar…
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That’s “hello” in Swahili, the mother tongue of nearly five million people. Officially the term for this language is Kiswahili, a member of the Bantu language family that is spoken by several ethnic groups living from the Mozambique Channel from the northern part of Kenya up to the northern coast of Mozambique. Spoken almost exclusively in the Comoros Islands, the language is also spoken in Somalia. Most of East Africa uses Swahili as their lingua franca, with Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Kenya using it as their official language. Total number of speakers of Swahili worldwide is over 140 million.
Officially known as Kiswahili, this Bantu or African language is the language used by those living in Kenya all the way to Mozambique. In terms of similarity to other dialects, it resembles the language of the Somalians and those living in the Comoros Islands. It belongs to the Niger-Congo language family, which includes Bantu , Bantoid, Sabaki and Atlantic-Congo, among others.
Bernadine Racoma is a senior content writer at Day Translations, a human translation services company. After her long stint as an international civil servant and traveling the world for 22 years, she has aggressively pursued her interest in writing and research. Like her poetry, she writes everything from the heart, and she treats each written piece a work of art. She loves dogs!
For many in the Western world, their introduction to Swahili is in the famous phrase, “ Hakuna matata .” This was popularized in a song, thanks to the animated movie, “The Lion King.” It means “no worries.” Keeping this in mind, it really isn’t stressful to learn the language, especially for those who speak English as their primary language.
When speaking Swahili, it’s important to remember that the verb carries the subject as well as the tense. In Swahili, it seems like not a lot of words are necessary to communicate something. An entire sentence can be communicated in one word, such as in Ninakula, which translates to “I am eating” (“kula” is the verb for eat).
This way, you can eventually become a Rafiki (like the Baboon in Disney’s “The Lion King”), meaning friend. Incidentally, Simba means “lion.” Other words are quite easy, such as “ baba ” for father and “ mama ” for mom.
What may be surprising to many is that the alphabet used in Swahili is based in Arabic. This means that the writing system is of Latin and Arabic origins, making the language quite easy to learn. For one thing, it has the same vowels as the English language: a, e, i, o, u. However, unlike the English language, there are no vowel combinations in Swahili, so each vowel is pronounced separately even when next to each other.
Swahili is the most widely spoken African Language in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is the national language of Tanzania and Kenya, and is also spoken widely in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo and the Comoros. Current estimates place the number of speaker at 100 million people.
Swahili is the only language from Africa included among the official languages of the African Union and its status as a lingua franca in the east and central African region makes it an important language to learn. It is taught in more than 50 universities in US. It is also taught in many universities in Europe and Asia.