The Kiswahili language is the official language of Tanzania, but it is also spoken in many other parts of Africa: not surprisingly, it is the most widely spoken African language in the world, spoken by more than 140 million people. Its main characteristic also generally reflects that of the Tanzanian population, which is also open and flexible due to the fact that, over the centuries, it has been influenced by many different presences, including Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis, Germans and English, which have somehow made possible the presence of many terms borrowed from other languages.
This makes the Kiswahili language a fairly easy language to learn, partly because of the presence of simple constructs and a certain musicality that is articulated with speech.
Swahili alphabet letters
In the earliest records of this language, it appears that the first alphabet used was Arabic; to date, however, the written form uses the Latin alphabet.
With the exception of vowels, which are all equally present as in European languages, in consonants there is an absence of Q, C and X.
Swahili alphabet name and history
The name Swahili means “coastal,” and is largely explained by the fact that originally, it was used to refer to the peoples of the East African coast: in fact, the earliest records of this language indicate that it was commonly used during trade that took place between Africa and Asia, which is recorded from the first century BCE.
Its history and origin give us a very good understanding of its multicultural aspect: in fact, in the language spoken today there are a great many linguistic borrowings from Arabic, English, and German terms, which over time have contributed not only to contaminating the idiom, but also to making it as flexible, musical, open, and multicultural as it still is today. This also explains why it is not a very difficult language to learn.
In each case, 30 percent of the loans come from Arabic.
Latin alphabet and timely pronunciation of Swahili
In its written form, the Latin alphabet, which over time has replaced the original Arabic alphabet, is used today.
Many sounds are borrowed from Arabic, and in fact it is no coincidence that the standard pronunciation is the one that refers to the variety most used in Zanzibar: it should be mentioned, in this regard, that most of the words in this language are flat, in that the accent always falls on the penultimate syllable, except in a few cases where a consonant is accented.
In principle, however, vowels and consonants are pronounced similarly to Italian, but they may vary depending on the word being pronounced: to give an example, z is a sweet s reminiscent of the one used in the Italian pronunciation of the words “base,” “sbagliato” and not to be confused with the harsh s of “aspetta” or “gusto”; again, b is sonorous, and is reminiscent of the pronunciation of “balena” in Italian; ch is our c of “ciao”; there is a difference between d and dh, where the former is sonorous consonant reminiscent of the pronunciation of the Italian word “dente” while the latter is reminiscent of the English “that” and is interdental.
Grammar
Although Swahili, as mentioned above, is not a very complex language to learn, what might make it difficult is mainly its grammar and, more specifically, the number concordance based on the 8-class noun system, which is why a given prefix can be associated with both the singular and plural of a word: this means that it is necessary to know (and thus learn well) the singular and pattern of a class in order to obtain its identification and thus also the plural of the word.
Since this system of 8 classes can be difficult to learn, it is possible to overcome this limitation by turning the difficulty into automatism and mechanically learning individual words in both singular and plural, with the elements already declined (such as the qualifying adjective, the demonstrative adjective/pronome, and the possessive adjective/pronome): this is a procedure that can be helpful, but it is obviously complex and time-consuming, especially if the number of words to be learned is large.
In order to have a certain ease of expression, you might still consider learning the most common and useful phrases for travel, such as greetings, pleasantries, and phrases asking for help and information.If, however, you want to have a richer and deeper knowledge of the language, it is important to study grammar well.
