Chapter 1: Birth
Though Swahili does not have the globe-covering recognition of that of the languages we’ve covered so far on LangBios, it has an interesting story to tell as one of the largest languages to be born in Africa, many of which become forgotten or erased when looked at from outside perspectives in favor of post-colonial languages.
Swahili is thought to have been born around or before the first century, AD, for, as according to Greek accounts of trading records at the time, there was much trade of goods and people between what we now call the Swahili Coast and the Byzantine Empire. The peoples that inhabited the Coast are thought to have spoken many varieties of KiSwahili, a Bantu language of Sub-Saharan Africa, and as they traded with European and eventually Middle Eastern powers, groups of Swahili speakers began to gain local power and spread along the Coast.
As the Coast became more attractive to traders from all over—as it was directly accessible across the sea—it also garnered the attention of farmers and businessmen hailing from places from Arabia to India. These people integrated into Swahili-spoken lands and brought with them their own languages. As a result, Swahili has many loanwords from Arabic, Persian, and even Greek. Its name even derives from the Arabic word sawahil, the plural of sahil, which means “boundary” or “coast.”
With the growth in population of the Swahili Coast, ports began springing up on land (major examples include Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Malindi, Pangani, and Quelimane; covering modern Kenya to Mozambique) as well as on the islands that dot the sea around the Coast (such as the Comoros Islands and Zanzibar Archipelago). These ports eventually grew into small city-states.
Though the language is attested to have been alive for hundreds of years, it wasn’t until 1711 that the first written example can be attested. An obvious import from the Middle East, Swahili was originally written in the Arabic script.
Chapter 2: European Colonialism
The Swahili Coast was not colonized in a homogenous manner. First, with the Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of Africa, a new age of Portuguese control was initiated in Southeast Africa, including modern Mozambique and Tanzania. At this point goods and people from the Swahili Coast were disseminated around the world.
City-states north of Tanzania retained relative independence, continuing their long history of trade, until the 1880s, when British and German forces, under treaty, carved up former Portuguese Tanzania, which also included Rwanda and Burundi, for the Germans, and the Coast to the north (modern Kenya and Uganda) for the British.
During almost forty years of this political situation, English and Portuguese were spread throughout British East Africa and Mozambique, respectively, while German was mostly restricted to Europeans and elites in German East Africa while they propagated Swahili. This was done in a few other colonies (such as Spain in the Americas), where a popular local language was designated as the colony’s lingua franca instead of the colonizer’s language, as it is easier for all local linguistic groups to learn a similarly local language and communicate through that rather than teach all groups the colonizing language.
As a result of this, Swahili spread more rapidly throughout Tanzania as a lingua franca than German and, when Germany lost its colonial possessions along with its defeat in World War II, Tanzania retained Swahili as its largest language.
Just before the end of the war, the Belgian colony in the Democratic Republic of Congo took what would become Burundi and Rwanda from the German colony. These areas—the DRC, Burundi, and Rwanda—also held significant populations of Swahili speakers as the language’s usefulness as a lingua franca had spread from Tanzania’s coast inward.
After the War, Tanzania became a British possession, and remained so until 1961. The British were much better than the Germans in propagating their language and, as a result, English was spread as a language of international communication throughout Tanzania (though mostly on the coast) as it had in Uganda and Kenya. Because the latter two had had more time under the British, however, English was and is much more widely ingrained in society there, morphing from a lingua franca status (typically not used in the home) to one of the community. This is also what has happened in Mozambique, with Portuguese taking over as the language of trade and government, pushing Swahili back north where it came from.
Tanzania, though it has accepted English as an international language, has done a better job propagating its native Swahili, a language already spoken across tribal lines. This is significant because, not only is the country not embedding itself in a significant marker of post-colonialism by promoting English as a language of national integration, but it has accepted a native Southeast African language to largely make up the country and traverse its many ethnic groups and their languages. This balance is rare in post-colonial societies.
Following Tanzania’s independence from Britain in 1961, Uganda and Kenya held elections to break away in 1962 and 1963, respectively. The DRC, Rwanda, and Burundi continued as a Belgian colonies until 1960 (DRC) and 1962 (the other two, and Mozambique remained Portuguese until 1975.
Because of the spread of Swahili throughout all seven of the countries mentioned above, as well as the tendency of languages to change as they are spread and cut off by different borders, and because the colonizing European powers imposed their alphabet in different ways on the people of the Coast, there was a meeting 1928 about the standardization of the Swahili language (using the Latin alphabet) such that communication across boundaries and cultures would be preserved. At this meeting, which took place in Mombasa, Kenya, it was decided that the standard would be based on the Zanzibar dialect of Swahili.
Chapter 3: Swahili Today
Swahili holds official status and is widely spoken in Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Comoros, but is also spoken as a minority or second language in Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique, having spread to each with its usefulness as a lingua franca.
Those who speak it as a first or second language range from 120-150 million people, making it one of the most largely spoken languages of Africa by population.
Additionally, it is an officially designated language of the African Union (consisting of 54 countries in Africa), as well as the East African Community, for which it serves as the lingua franca to five countries.
It is regulated by the Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (“National Swahili Council”) in Tanzania and the Chama cha Kiswahili cha Taifa (“National Swahili Association”) in Kenya.
We’re so used to languages of wider communication being European in origin. There are many that are widely spoken, but none have the reach that European, post-colonizers had on the languages of the world. Africa displays this perfectly, with each of its post-colonial societies retaining some aspect of the European languages that were spoken by their colonizers. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but, as we will discuss in a future sociopolitics topic, it’s hard for post-colonial societies to navigate native identities when there is such a large European presence still remaining. The life of Swahili shows that this does not have to be the case, that African identities and African lingua francas can survive and take the place of European languages; a highly symbolic achievement.
Language Biographies 