Kiswahili

Kiswahili, also known as Swahili, is a Bantu language in the Sabaki sub-branch spoken along the East African coast and across the African Great Lakes region. It functions as a lingua franca across many communities and is an official or national language in several countries, notably Tanzania and Kenya, and is widely used in education, media, and government throughout East Africa.

Linguistically, Kiswahili belongs to the Niger-Congo language family. It features a noun-class system and a rich verbal morphology that encodes subject, tense, aspect, and mood. The language has a sizable number of loanwords from Arabic due to historic trade on the Indian Ocean coast, as well as borrowings from Persian, Portuguese, English, and other languages. Its orthography is based on the Latin alphabet, and standardized Kiswahili (Kiswahili sanifu) is promoted for formal education and media.

History and status: Kiswahili developed as a contact language among Bantu-speaking populations and Arabic-speaking traders along the coastal zones, gradually expanding inland. In modern times, it has been standardized for wide formal use and serves as a vehicle for national and regional education, media, and literature. The language is taught in schools in several countries and used in newspapers, radio, and television, contributing to its role as a symbol of regional identity.

Dialects and distribution: Regional varieties include Coastal Swahili, spoken in coastal cities and islands, and Inland Swahili, spoken inland. Despite dialectal differences, speakers generally understand the standard form, and Kiswahili continues to expand through Pan-African and international contexts.