SWAHILI LANGUAGE. Swahili belongs to the Bantu family of languages (q.v.) and is spoken on the eastern coast of Africa, ranging approximately from Warsheikh, on the Somali coast, to the mouth of the Ruvuma (Io° 3o' S.). It has also obtained wide currency as a trade language, having been carried by Arab caravans to the region of the Great Lakes before the middle of the 19th century and, since then, through European influence, into the Congo basin ; and, in a very debased form, it is the vernacular of some Pygmy tribes on the Ituri.
The Swahili language was first made known to Europeans by Henry Salt, whose Travels (he visited Abyssinia in 1809, by way of the Cape of Good Hope) was published in 1814. He calls it "Sowauli" and gives a short and very imperfect vocabulary. The first real study of the language was made by Johann Ludwig Krapf, 1810-82, a German who went to East Africa in the service of the Church Missionary Society, reaching Mombasa in His dictionary, recently revised and supplemented by Archdeacon Binns, is still a standard work; the principal English contributors to the subject are Edward Steere (Bishop of Zanzibar from to 1882), Arthur C. Madan (d. 192o) and the late William Ernest Taylor, for many years a missionary in Kenya Colony.
Character of the Language.—Swahili is a Bantu language. Its grammatical structure has been little affected by Arabic in fluence. It includes Arabic words. Contact with outside influences has tended to efface some characteristic Bantu peculiarities and brought about an extensive use of borrowed prepositions and adverbs, which gives it greater elasticity and increases its pos sibilities as a literary language.
Swahili has no grammatical gender, but a division of nouns into classes, each with its characteristic pronoun; it inflects nouns by means of prefixes, makes the possessive agree with the thing possessed ("the house of the man" not "the man's house"), and places the object-pronoun between the subject-pronoun and the verb, as if one should say "I him saw," in one word. Though
these classes and their concords look formidable, the language is by no means difficult to learn and is quite easy to pronounce.
As the official language of Kenya Colony and Tanganyika Ter ritory, it is indispensable to all civil servants, to settlers, mission aries and business men. It is spoken and understood by many natives, even where it is not the local vernacular.
Dialects and Literature.—The principal dialects are those of Lamu (northern), Mombasa (central) and Zanzibar (south ern) ; the last-named being the standard for official use. That of Lamu has preserved many archaisms and comes nearest to that known as "Kingozi," in which the ancient poems, and those more recently imitated from them, are composed. A large body of poetry exists in manuscript, some few specimens having been pub lished in Europe. The metres used are adapted from the Arabic, as closely as the differing rhythm of the two languages permits. Those traditionally attributed to Liongo Fumo may, if authentic, go back to the 12th or 13th century, and their language is cer tainly very archaic. In prose, almost the only texts available till recently, have been taken down by Europeans from native reci tation, but of late years (not to mention translations made by Europeans) native writers have begun to appear, and the Swahili magazine, Mambo Leo published at Dar-es-Salaam, under Euro pean editorship, attracts an increasing number of native contribu tors. There is an immense amount of traditional matter in cir culation: folk-tales, some indigenous to the soil, others of Indian, Persian or Arab origin, which, filtered through generations of oral transmission, have acquired a distinctly African colouring. The people, both men and women, have the same facility of improvi sation as the Italian peasants. Some songs have a rhythm (prob ably chanted to the drum) but no metre. Others have both metre and rhyme, often of a very pleasing character. Songs and proverbs —frequently very pithy—have been collected.