Swahili Language: What You Need to Know

The name Swahili originates from Arabic laSwahiliich means ‘of the coast’, This Swahili was named from the Arabic word sawaahili (سواحلي), which means ‘of the coast’, which you would use to refer to coastal people. The east coast of Africa is an area extending from Lamu Island, Kenya, in the north to the southern border of Tanzania in the south. The Bantu languages form a sKiswahilif the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Swahili (kiswahili) has 80 to 110 million speakers, but interestingly, very few speak it as their mother tongue, and 90, million speak,k it as a second language. Open to multiple influences, Swahili is first of all a Bantu language (family of Niger-Kordofanian languages), of which it has some fundamental characteristics such as the high number of nominal classes or genres, and simple phonetics with the tonic accent almost always on the penultimate syllable of words. The declension of nouns and adjectives is based not on the variation of the endings, but on the use of prefixes that specify the nominal class and the number (singular or plural). The verbal system is complex in that, through the precise concatenation of prefixes and suffixes, the person, the tense and the root are merged into one word. From a lexical point of view, modern Swahili incorporates terms coming mainly, from other African languages ​​and to a lesser extent from Arabic, Persian, Hindi and English. Then come Porese, German and French terms, often reserved for specific sectors such as example, navigation, religion or law. A curiosity of the Swahili is the unusual way of counting the hours of the day starting from sunrise, always at 6 in the morning, and ending at sunset, always at 6 in the evening. According to this system, 9 a.m. becomethe3 a.m. and 9 p.m. are 3 p.m.