Habari ya Asubuhi!

 

The Swahili Language

“The place where most language learning crashes is the brain-curdling confusion which happens when you get past being a raw beginner…” Laurence Wood

To the beginner, the Swahili language appears to be deceptively easy. Nouns are not accompanied by the word ‘a’ or ‘the’ and, unlike French, there are no masculine/feminine nouns. However, instead of these two noun classes, there turn out to be five (or ten depending on whether you count singular and plural separately) and whilst anything that breathes – humans and animals – slots into the m-wa class, other nouns are not so easily categorised and often depend on their origins whether Bantu or Arabic.

Sometimes Swahili is amazingly economic – ‘I am not sleeping’ translated to a single-worded ‘silali’ but it can also become long-winded – ‘hail’ for example is ‘ mvu ya mawe’ – literally, rain of rocks. Occasionally, it is onomatopoeic – a motorbike is a ‘pikipiki’ and a tractor a ‘tingatinga’, although the word ‘trekta’, reveals the patronising colonial habit of using an English word and simply adding a vowel; this trend was consciously rejected after independence but many such words still exist. A computer, for example, can be called a ‘kompyuta’ but another word is ‘tarakirishi’.

“To force Swahili to conform to the grammar of English is like cooking ripe bananas...the result is bokoboko not mchanyato."  Hamisi Akida 

The evolution of Swahili tracks faithfully the history of the country, the words reflecting the influence of Arabs, Hindus, Portuguese, Germans and English as well as the original Bantu language; people who came to the country to trade and to conquer or colonise.

“Swahili is an agglutinative language of East Africa with complex verbal morphology” Wiktionary

Unlike Tanzania – where Swahili is used in its purest form – Kenya chose to adopt English as its formal business and political language – leading to a situation in which some politicians cannot speak Swahili and some citizens cannot speak any English. Nevertheless it is a unifying language for all those people who speak a tribal language first, and Swahili second.

The Swahili spoken by many Kenyans - indigenous and immigrant –is often known as ‘Kitchen Swahili’ reflecting a desire simply to ‘get by’ when communicating across the employer/employee divide. Anyone learning proper Swahili may feel thwarted and disappointed to find that they cannot understand the spoken or written Swahili word in Kenya, pared down as it is, especially if they are then conversing with someone who is a Kikuyu where the ‘l’ and the ‘r’ are interchangeable – thus shorts known as ‘kaptura’ by some, are known as ‘kaptula’ by others. However, any attempt to try is received with great appreciation and respect – and there’s never any shortage of people wanting to help you to improve; the hardest part is developing an ear for a language that is spoken extremely quickly.

It is a logical, almost mathematical language, but at the same time romantic and conceptual. Once the basic rules for the language are learnt – subject marker-tense-object-verb-ending – it begins to make more sense although some words become unfathomably and unpronounced-ably long unless one knows when to take a breath. The emphasis is always placed on the last but one syllable and each vowel has only one simple and distinct, sound. The urgency of a situation or the extent of something is often indicated by repetition within the word – ‘polepole’ means ‘slowly’ and ‘fluctuation’ becomes ‘mabadalikobadaliko’ from the word for ‘change’.

“I am not willing to take part in the spoiling of Swahili.” Sir Mbarak Ali Hinawy

Far from being a dying language, the use of Swahili is growing across the continent of Africa and is now the most commonly taught African language in the United States where African Americans have embraced it.

Many Swahili words have become embedded in the English language - words like ‘mufti’, ‘jumbo’ and ‘safari’ and the name of the game, ‘Jenga’, simply means ‘build’.

Hakuna matata and kwa heri!


Further reading:

The Story of Swahili, John M. Mugane, Ohio University Press 2015
Learn Swahili Quickly and Easily, Laurence Wood and Jaba Tumaini Shadrack, ISBN 9781520968520
Swahili Practical Dictionary, Nicholas Awde, Hippocrene Books, 2017