Name used by its speakers (Endonym): Kiswahili
Native speakers (estimated): 5-10 million
Total speakers, including second-language (estimated): 60-150 million. Estimates vary widely, but as the prime lingua franca of East Africa it is spoken (or at least understood) by far more people than speak it as a first language.
Where it’s spoken: The majority of native Swahili speakers live in Tanzania (5.8 million), Uganda (2.1 million) and Kenya (1.9 million), in each of which it is co-official with English, though a large majority of each country’s population speaks neither one as a native language. Additionally, the status of Swahili varies across other nations of East and Central Africa. In Rwanda it is one of four official languages (along with Kinyarwanda, French, and English) but taught and spoken mostly as a second language. In Burundi it is taught and used similarly, but has no official status. Congo Swahili is one of four recognized national languages in the multilingual Democratic Republic of the Congo, though French is the sole official language. Swahili is one of many Bantu languages spoken in Mozambique (where Portuguese is official).
In contrast with many European languages which were spread over centuries of trade and colonization, Swahili has been promoted as a lingua franca by newly independent nations in East Africa as a means of advancing national and regional unity. Both Kenya and Tanganyika (later Tanzania) adopted Swahili as their national language in the 1960s, and among the official working languages of the African Union, East African Community, and the Southern African Development Community, Swahili is the only one native to Africa. July 7 was designated World Swahili Language Day by UNESCO in 2022, and there are some in Africa who support its use as a pan-African language.1
It has been estimated that Swahili is spoken by 90,000 people in the United States.
Language family: Swahili belongs to the Bantu branch of the Atlantic-Congo family, which is part of the larger Niger-Congo family. Though Bantu languages are only one of many branches, they are by far the largest, representing an estimated half of all Niger-Congo speakers and 30% of the entire African population. Though Swahili is the most widely spoken Bantu language overall, it doesn’t make the top ten in terms of native speakers. A highly distinctive characteristic that Swahili shares with other Atlantic–Congo languages is a system of up to 16 noun classes—similar to the genders in European languages, only lots more of them.
Related languages: Other Bantu languages with large numbers of speakers include Lingala (spoken in the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Zulu and Xhosa (spoken in South Africa and Zimbabwe), and Kinyarwanda and Kirundi (the national languages of Rwanda and Burundi, respectively).
Two others have been considered by some either dialects of Swahili or distinct languages. Congo Swahili differs significantly from Standard Swahili due to the influences of French and other Congolese languages; it is also known by the name Kingwana. Comorian, spoken in the islands of the Comoros, includes four languages closely related to Swahili.
Because Swahili has long been a language of cross-cultural interaction in East Africa, first with Arab and Persian traders then later with European colonial powers, it is estimated that 16–20% of Swahili vocabulary are derived from non-Bantu languages. The largest portion of these come from Arabic, including the name Swahili, derived from a term meaning ‘of the coasts’; more recent borrowings come from European languages. Sample loanwords include:
ARABIC: Kitabu (from kitab, ‘book’); jamhuri (jumhuria, ‘republic’); safari (safar, ‘travel’); farasi (faras, ‘horse’). Rafiki (‘friend’) comes from rafiq (‘companion’); sheria (‘law’) from Sharia. Habari (‘news’) derives from Arabic habr (‘ink’).
PERSIAN: Bandari (from bander, ‘port’); harusi (from arusi, ‘wedding’); dalasini (from Persian darchin or Hindi dalachini, ‘cinnamon’).
PORTUGUESE: Meza (from mesa, ‘table’); bomba (‘pipe’, from bomba ‘pump’).
GERMAN: Shule (from Schule, ‘school’).
ENGLISH: Afisa (officer), bafu (bathroom), dikteta (dictator), glavu (gloves), inspekta (inspector), kamera (camera), kaunta (counter), meneja (manager), opereta (operator), pampu (pump), sekondari (secondary school), timu (team), warsha (workshop).
NOTES
1 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-60333796
BBC World News, 16 Feb 2022. Swahili’s bid to become a language for all of Africa.