ABSTRACT
Swahili belongs to the North-East Coastal Bantu group of the Benue-Congo family, a branch of the huge Niger-Congo phylum. The name is derived from the Arabic sawāhil, the broken plural of sāhil ‘coast’. The language’s own name for itself is Kiswahili, and this is sometimes used also in English. The prominence of the language within the Bantu family derives not from the number of native speakers (4–5 million people – far fewer than, for example, Shona, Zulu and Xhosa) but from its use over a wide area by perhaps 60 million as a second language or lingua franca. Swahili is the national language of Tanzania and of Kenya, and is a main language in parts of the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are many dialect forms spread over an enormous area stretching from the Somali border to Mozambique, and from the Comoros Islands to the Congo. Some of the further-flung dialects are very divergent. The first steps towards the creation of a standardized Swahili were taken in 1930, when the Inter-Territorial Language Committee was formed. African participation in this body began in 1946, with representatives from Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Zanzibar. The work of standardizing the language is now in the hands of the Institute of Swahili Research in Dar es Salaam.
