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Swahili (also known as “Kiswahili” meaning ‘Swahili language’) is the first language of the Swahili people who inhabit several large stretches of the Indian Ocean coastline from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique, including the Comoros Islands. Although only 5 to 10 million people speak it as their native first language, over 40 million people speak Swahili as their second language. Swahili is a lingua franca of much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is one of various national or official languages of other nations, such as Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. It is the only African language among the official working languages of the African Union.

Thus Swahili is spoken natively by various groups traditionally inhabiting about 1,500 miles of the East African coastline. About 25% of the Swahili vocabulary derives from the Arabic language resulting from the fact that the language has evolved through centuries of contact between Arabic-speaking traders and many different Bantu-speaking peoples inhabiting Africa's Indian Ocean coast. It also has incorporated some Persian, German, Indian and English words into its vocabulary due to contact with these different groups of people over the generations. Uganda made Swahili a required subject in primary schools in 1992, although this mandate has not been well implemented, and declared it an official language in 2005. Swahili, or some other closely related language, is also used by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Rwanda, Mozambique, Somalia, and Zambia and also nearly the entire population of the Comoros.
The name 'Swahili' comes from the plural of the Arabic meaning "boundary" or "coast" used as an adjective to mean "coastal dwellers".

One of the earliest known documents in Swahili is an epic poem in the Arabic script titled Utendi wa Tambuka ("The History of Tambuka"). It is dated 1728. Although the Latin alphabet has since become standard under the influence of European colonial powers, Arabic script is still very widely used.

Mithali (e.g. “Haraka haraka haina baraka - Haste has no blessing".), i.e. “wordplay, risqué or suggestive puns and lyric rhyme, are deeply inscribed in Swahili culture, in form of Swahili parables, proverbs, and allegory”. Mithali is uncovered globally within ‘Swah’ rap music. It provides the music with rich cultural, historical, and local textures and insight.
Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes: /ɑ/, /ɛ/, /i/, /ɔ/, and /u/. The pronunciation of the “u” stands between International Phonetic Alphabet (u) and (o) as found in Italian, for example. Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress.

The vowels are pronounced as follows:

• /ɑ/ is pronounced like the "a" in father
• /ɛ/ is pronounced like the "e" in bed
• /i/ is pronounced like the "i" in ski
• /ɔ/ is pronounced like the "o" in American English horse, or like a tenser version of "o" in British English "lot"
• /u/ is pronounced between the "u" in rude and the "o" in wrote.

Swahili has no diphthongs; in vowel combinations, each vowel is pronounced separately.

In common with all Bantu languages, in most dictionaries, verbs are listed in their indicative root form, for example -kata meaning 'to cut/chop'. In a simple sentence, prefixes for grammatical tense and person are added, as ninakata 'I cut'. Here ni- means 'I' and na- indicates a specific time (present tense unless stated otherwise).

Swahili time runs from dawn to dusk, rather than midnight to midday. 7am and 7pm are therefore both one o'clock while midnight and midday are six o'clock. Swahili time derives from the fact that the sun rises at around 6am and sets at around 6pm everyday in most of the areas where Swahili speakers live.

Modern standard Swahili is based on Kiunguja, the dialect spoken in Zanzibar town, the Zanzibar dialect is considered the ''Swahili Standard”. There are numerous local dialects of Swahili, many of which are mutually unintelligible, including the following.

• Kiunguja: spoken in Zanzibar City and environs on Unguja (Zanzibar) Island. Other dialects occupy the bulk of the island.
• Kitumbatu and Kimakunduchi: the countryside dialects of the island of Zanzibar. Kimakunduchi is a recent renaming of "Kihadimu"; the old name means "serf", hence it is considered pejorative.
• Kimrima: spoken around Pangani, Vanga, Dar es Salaam, Rufiji and Mafia Island.
• Kimgao: formerly spoken around Kilwa and to the south.
• Kipemba: local dialect of the island of Pemba.
• Kimvita: the major dialect of Mombasa (also known as "Mvita", which means "war", in reference to the many wars which were fought over it) , the other major dialect alongside Kiunguja.
• Kingare: sub-dialect of the Mombasa area.
• Chijomvu: sub-dialect of the Mombasa area.
• Chi-Chifundi: dialect of the southern Kenya coast.
• Kivumba: dialect of the southern Kenya coast.
• Kiamu: spoken in and around the island of Lamu (Amu).
• Sheng: a sort of street slang, this is a blend of Swahili, English, and some ethnic languages spoken in and around Nairobi in informal settings. Sheng originated in the Nairobi slums and is considered fashionable and cosmopolitan among a growing segment of the population.

Languages similar to Swahili

• Kimwani: spoken in the Kerimba Islands and northern coastal Mozambique.
• Kingwana: spoken in the eastern and southern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sometimes called Copperbelt Swahili, especially the variety spoken in the south.
• Comorian language, the language of the Comoros Islands, which form a chain between Tanzania and the northern tip of Madagascar.
• Chimwiini was traditionally spoken around the Somali town of Barawa. In recent years, most of its speakers have fled to Kenya to escape civil war. Whether Chimwiini is Swahili or a distinct language is a question that provokes division within each of the following groups: linguists specializing in Swahili, Chimwiini speakers, and speakers of other Swahili dialects.

“Kizigua” is traditionally spoken in the lower Juba province in Somalia near to Kismayo city as a dialect by the Bantu Negroes who were brought there in the 19th century as slaves.

There is as yet insufficient historical or archaeological evidence to allow one to state exactly when and where either the Swahili language or the Swahili culture emerged. Nevertheless, it is assumed that the Swahili speaking people have occupied their present territories, hugging the Indian Ocean, since well before AD 1000. Arab and Persian traders are known to have had extensive contact with the coastal peoples from at least the 6th Century of the Christian Era, and Islam began to spread along the East African Coast from at least the 9th Century.

People from Oman and the Persian Gulf settled the Zanzibar Archipelago, helping spread both Islam and the Swahili language and culture with major trading and cultural centres as far as Sofala (Mozambique) and Kilwa (Tanzania) to the south, and Mombasa and Lamu in Kenya, Barawa, Merca, Kismayu and Mogadishu (Somalia) in the north, the Comoros Islands and northern Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.

Starting about 1800, the rulers of Zanzibar organized trading expeditions into the interior of the mainland, up to the various lakes in the continent's Great Rift Valley. They soon established permanent trade routes and Swahili-speaking merchants settled in stations along the new trade routes. For the most part, this process did not lead to genuine colonization. But colonisation did occur west of Lake Malawi, in what is now Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, giving rise to a highly divergent dialect.

After Germany seized the region known as Tanganyika (present day mainland Tanzania) for a colony in 1886, it took notice of the wide (but shallow) dissemination of Swahili, and soon designated Swahili as a colony-wide official administrative language. The British did not do so in neighbouring Kenya, even though they made moves in that direction. The British and Germans both were keen to facilitate their rule over colonies with dozens of languages spoken by selecting a single local language that hopefully would be well accepted by the natives. Swahili was the only good candidate in these two colonies.

In the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I, it was dispossessed of all its overseas territories. Tanganyika fell into British hands. The British authorities, with the collaboration of British Christian missionary institutions active in these colonies, increased their resolve to institute Swahili as a common language for primary education and low level governance throughout their East African colonies (Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, and Kenya). Swahili was to be subordinate to English: university education, much secondary education, and governance at the highest levels would be conducted in English.

One key step in spreading Swahili was to create a standard written language. In June 1928, an inter-territorial conference was held at Mombasa, at which the Zanzibar dialect, Kiunguja, was chosen to be the basis for standardizing Swahili. Today's standard Swahili, the version taught as a second language, is for practical purposes Zanzibar Swahili, even though there are minor discrepancies between the written standard and the Zanzibar vernacular.

At the present time, some 90 percent of approximately 39 million Tanzanians speak Swahili. Kenya's population is comparable, but the prevalence of Swahili is lower, though still widespread. The five eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (to be subdivided in 2009) are Swahili speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese speak it; and it is starting to rival Lingala as the most important national language of that country. In Uganda, the Baganda generally don't speak Swahili, but it is in common use among the 25 million people elsewhere in the country, and is currently being implemented in schools nationwide in preparation for the East African Community. The usage of Swahili in other countries is commonly overstated, being common only in market towns, among returning refugees, or near the borders of Kenya and Tanzania. Even so, Swahili possibly exceeds Hausa of West Africa as the sub-Saharan indigenous language with the greatest number of speakers, and Swahili speakers may number some ten to fifteen percent of the 750 million people of sub-Saharan Africa (2005 World Bank Data).

Many of the world's institutions have responded to Kiswahili's growing prominence. It is one of the languages that feature in world radio stations such as The BBC, the Voice of America (USA), Radio Deutschewelle (Germany), Radio Moscow International (Russia), Radio China International, Radio Sudan, and Radio South Africa.

In Sid Meier's Civilization IV, a well known turn-based strategy computer game, the menu theme music is a rearrangement of the Lord's Prayer in Swahili, sharing the same name - "Baba Yetu" ("Our Father").

In Michael Jackson's 1987 single "Liberian Girl" the repeated intro is the Swahili phrase "Nakupenda pia, nakutaka pia, mpenzi wee!" which translates "I love you too, and I want you too, you my love!" Disney's animated film “The Lion King “contains several Swahili references.  ”Simba", the main character's name, means lion (this is related to the Sanskrit word simha for "lion"), "Rafiki" means friend, and the name of the popular song "Hakuna Matata" means "there are no problems". In The Lion King II: Simba's Pride Scar's adopted son is called "Kovu", Swahili for "scar".
Bungie Studios uses this language in some of its games (Halo 2).

Translation projects undertaken in Swahili include web site content, sales and marketing material, documentation requirements for engineering and manufacturing.

Total Language Solutions are translation specialists in DTP, print ready and electronic forms of material, integrating text and diagrams and more besides into and out of Swahili.

Total Language Solutions are translation experts in the relevance of text, drawings, colours and layout presentation and localisation to meet consumer expectations and norms, without causing offence.

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Our language translation prices are from the translation service to or from English and is based on price per 1,000 words (pro rata).