No one in the "Your Language Rank" thread mentioned Swahili, which is supposed to be a lingua franca over a large area of East Africa. So I thought I'd start a thread to ask some questions about the language.
1. Is the use of Swahili growing, staying the same, or diminishing? My impression was that it was more useful in Tanzania than in Kenya, but it could also be used in some other countries.
2. Are the different versions/dialects mutually intelligible? (Or intelligible to other Bantu speakers?) And is there a location (or locations) where they speak the "standard"?
3. Has anyone out there (especially non-Africans) tried to learn Swahili? The pronunciation and orthography look rather straightforward, but the grammar looks rather unique to a non-Bantu speaker.
<< Has anyone out there (especially non-Africans) tried to learn Swahili? >>
I once knew an Australian who did church work in East Africa.
He indicated that he was reasonably good at Swahili.
I had a Math teacher from the US who claimed to speak Swahili, although I never heard a word.
For people interested in an overview of several languages INCLUDING SWAHILI, I suggest the incredibly inexpensive 31 Languages of the World software. I paid less than 5 dollars for this fun program and it includes sections where you can record and playback your voice for comparison with the native speakers. There are grammar sections, tourist phrases, games, etc. It's great for language shoppers who don't know what language to learn and it's good as a refresher for tourist language.
There aren't any american tribal languages, but it does include Zulu, Bengali, Thai, Haitian Creole.
Languages like Spanish, French (there is also CANADIAN FRENCH), German, etc. have longer sections/more words.
I have heard Swahilli is similar to Arabic.
<<I have heard Swahilli is similar to Arabic.>>
Only in vocabulary. Swahili has borrowed a lot of words from Arabic, in the same way that English has from Latin and French, but the grammar and day-to-day vocabulary are still Bantu, which is completely unrelated and very structurally different from Arabic, a Semitic language.
Lugha ni mfumo wa sauti za nasibu zilizokua katika mpango maalum na zilizokubaliwa na jamii ya watu fulani ili zitumike katika mawasiliano.
Mara chache neno lugha linatumika kwa taratibu za kuwasiliana za wanyama. Lakini taratibu hizo ni tofauti sana: Katika lugha za wanyama, sauti moja ina maana moja tu. Lakini katika lugha za binadamu, sauti nyingi zinaunganishwa kutengeneza maneno, na maneno mengi yanaunganishwa kutengeneza sentensi. Hivyo mnyama ambaye anaweza kutengeneza sauti ishirini tofauti anaweza "kusema" mambo ishirini tu. Kwa upande mwingine mtu ambaye anaweza kutengeneza sauti ishirini, anaweza kusema mambo zaidi ya millioni.
My grandmother and her family used to live in Kenya when it was part of the British Empire as my grandfather, who was in the British Army, was stationed there. She learnt how to speak it.
Swahili is a Bantu language and is the spoken in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. English is also the official language of those countries but Kenya is the only one in which Swahili is official.
The formation of Swahili language and culture was as a result of interaction between African, Asians and Arabs and "Swahili" was used to mean “the coast”.
Unlike European languages such as French (masculine and feminine) and German (masculine, feminine, and neuter) which have just a few genders, Swahili has TWENTY TWO noun classes.
In common with all Bantu languages, Swahili grammar arranges nouns into a number of classes. The ancestral system had 22 classes, counting singular and plural as distinct according to the Meinhof system, with most Bantu languages sharing at least ten of these. Swahili employs sixteen: six classes that usually indicate singular nouns, five classes that usually indicate plural nouns, a class for abstract nouns, a class for verbal infinitives used as nouns, and three classes to indicate location.
class ...nominal prefix ...example... translation
1 ...........m- ................mtu ..........person
2 ...........wa- .............watu .........persons
3 ............m- ...............mti ............tree
4 ............mi- ...............miti........... trees
5 ............Ø/ji- .............jicho ...........eye
6 ............ma- .............macho .........eyes
7 ............ki- ................kisu............ knife
8 ............vi- ................visu ............knives
9 ...........Ø/n-............... ndoto .........dream
10 .........Ø/n-.................ndoto ........dreams
11 .........u- ...................uani ..........backyard
14 .........u- ...................utoto.......... childhood
Nouns beginning with m- in the singular and wa- in the plural denote animate beings, especially people. Examples are mtu, meaning 'person' (plural watu), and mdudu, meaning 'insect' (plural wadudu). A class with m- in the singular but mi- in the plural often denotes plants, such as mti 'tree', miti trees. The infinitive of verbs begins with ku-, e.g. kusoma 'to read'. Other classes are harder to categorize. Singulars beginning in ki- take plurals in vi-; they often refer to hand tools and other artifacts. This ki-/vi- alteration even applies to foreign words where the ki- was originally part of the root, so vitabu "books" from kitabu "book" (from Arabic kitāb "book"). This class also contains languages (such as the name of the language Kiswahili), and diminutives, which had been a separate class in earlier stages of Bantu. Words beginning with u- are often abstract, with no plural, e.g. utoto 'childhood'.
A fifth class begins with n- or m- or nothing, and its plural is the same. Another class has ji- or no prefix in the singular, and takes ma- in the plural; this class is often used for augmentatives. When the noun itself does not make clear which class it belongs to, its concords do. Adjectives and numerals commonly take the noun prefixes, and verbs take a different set of prefixes.
singular
mtoto mmoja anasoma
child one is reading
"One child is reading"
-----------
plural
watoto wawili wanasoma
children two are reading
"Two children are reading"
singular
ndizi moja inatosha
banana one suffices
"One banana is enough"
---------------
plural
ndizi mbili zinatosha
bananas two suffice
"Two bananas are enough"
The same noun root can be used with different noun-class prefixes for derived meanings: human mtoto (watoto) "child (children)", abstract utoto "childhood", diminutive kitoto (vitoto) "infant(s)", augmentative toto (matoto) "big child (children)". Also vegetative mti (miti) "tree(s)", artifact kiti (viti) "stool(s)", augmentative jiti (majiti) "large tree", kijiti (vijiti) "stick(s)", ujiti (njiti) "tall slender tree".
Although the Swahili noun class system is technically grammatical gender, there is a difference from the grammatical gender of European languages: In Swahili, the class assignments of nouns is still largely semantically motivated, whereas the European systems are mostly arbitrary. However, the classes cannot be understood as simplistic categories such as 'people' or 'trees'. Rather, there are extensions of meaning, words similar to those extensions, and then extensions again from these. The end result is a semantic net that made sense at the time, and often still does make sense, but which can be confusing to a non-speaker.
Take the ki-/vi- class. Originally it was two separate genders: artifacts (Bantu class 7/8, utensils & hand tools mostly) and diminutives (Bantu class 12). Examples of the first are kisu "knife"; kiti "chair, stool", from mti "tree, wood"; chombo "vessel" (a contraction of ki-ombo). Examples of the latter are kitoto "infant", from mtoto "child"; kitawi "frond", from tawi "branch"; and chumba (ki-umba) "room", from nyumba "house". It is the diminutive sense that has been furthest extended. An extension common to many languages is approximation and resemblance (having a 'little bit' of some characteristic, like -y or -ish is English). For example, there is kijani "green", from jani "leaf" (compare English 'leafy'), kichaka "bush" from chaka "clump", and kivuli "shadow" from uvuli "shade".
wikipedia.org