ABSTRACT
Swahili scholars have long been concerned with phonological and morphological differences among Swahili dialects but have accorded slight attention to comparative lexical analysis. Polomé stressed in a recent paper that a ‘thorough word-geographical examination of the Swahili dialectal lexicon’ 1 is urgently needed. Polomé’s paper pointed out that a good deal of preliminary work has already been done, consisting principally of lists of dialectal contrasts in lexical items appended to grammatical sketches of different dialects, but that no Systematical dialectal survey of the Swahili lexicon’ is available. 2 Such a survey, it is felt, would have many historical, cultural and socio-linguistic implications: ‘It would also put the discussion on the origin of Swahili and its dialects on more solid bases, as it would make valid comparisons possible with the neighbouring Bantu dialects all along the coast. Besides, taking into consideration the spread of Swahili inland, it would give valuable hints as to the area of the Swahili territory from which the up-country dialects have derived their vocabulary… . important also will be the tracking of the replacement of Bantu words by local synonyms or the choice between semantically closely related lexical items of the word resembling a local Bantu term… .’ 3
