Jambo! It’s week 6 in Bloomsbury Linguistics’ quest to find five fun facts about various languages from around the world. This week, we’re moving to a new continent - Africa. Please do get in touch with us @BloomsburyLing, #5funfacts, and let us know what you think about our Five Fun Facts about Swahili!
1) Swahili is a Bantu language, part of the wider Niger-Congo family. Swahili has only 5 million or so native speakers, but, as it serves as a lingua franca in much of Southeast Africa, the total number of Swahili speakers is over 140 million and it is one of the official languages of the African Union.
2) Beginning as a costal language before spreading along the eastern ‘Swahili Coast’, modern Swahili has been influenced by a number of languages over the years. Some Arabic has penetrated the vocabulary due to contact with Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants of the coast, and Swahili was for a long time written in an Arabic script. German, Portuguese, French, Hindi and English words have also been incorporated into the language. For example:
hoteli - hotel
picha - picture
muziki - music
redio - radio
3) Letters written in 1711 in the region of Kilwa, in eastern Tanzania, are believed to be the first ever documents to be written in Swahili. These letters were sent to the Portuguese people of Mozambique, as well as to local allies, and are preserved in the Historical Archive of Goa in India.
4) Swahili is one of the easiest African languages for English speakers to learn as, like English, it has no lexical tone, which is not the case in many sub-Saharan African languages. However, one of the main differences between English and Swahili is that Swahili uses particles at the beginning of the word to indicate verb tense (present, past, future) and person (I, you, we, they, etc).
5) Most people would probably assume that they know no Swahili whatsoever but if you’ve ever watched Disney’s The Lion King, you may actually know more than you thought! For example:
- Simba - lion
- Nala - gift
- Rafiki - friend
- Pumbaa - stupid or slow witted
- Shenzi (one of the Hyenas) - Uncivilized or savage
- Asante sana (in Rafiki’s song, beginning “Asante sana, squash banana”) - thank you very much
And, of course, Hakuna Matata really does mean no worries!
So, asante sana and remember to come back next week for something a little bit different - our five fun facts about Sign Language!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
Recent Comments