Celebrating World Kiswahili Language Day!

The United Nations ranks Swahili as one of the most spoken languages globally with more than 200 million speakers.

 

Swahili is prominently spoken in the African Great Lakes region and is also the East African lingua franca. Tanzania is the country with the largest number of native speakers, at about 15 million people. Although Swahili partly originated in the coastal regions of Kenya, the country has approximately 2 million native speakers.

 

In terms of the proportion of the population speaking the language, 98% of the Tanzanian population are proficient in Swahili. In Kenya, the percentage of Kiswahili speakers is slightly lower, at about 80%. Compared to the two countries, Swahili is less popular in Uganda, with less than 50% of the population speaking the language. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has about 1,000,000 people using Swahili as a first language with another 9,100,000 who have adopted it as a lingua franca. Other countries where Swahili is less popular include Mozambique (less than 10%) and Rwanda (less than 1%).

 

Swahili has a respectable status in many countries in the East African region. For instance, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania have incorporated it as one of the official languages. In addition, Swahili is the national language for Kenya and Tanzania.

Swahili is often considered one of the easier Sub-Saharan African languages to learn, largely because it doesn't rely on lexical tone. Its many loanwords from other languages also make it more accessible to learners familiar with those tongues.

 

Some of the unique features of the language include the different dialects that differ with geographic location and the use of colloquialisms or informal language especially among non-native speakers.