Languages, Part 5
Kiswahili in
11 countries
Kiswahili
Why is Kiswahili
special?
Kiswahili is unique. It deserves all of the attention that
it gets. This item in our series is to say why that is, and to say why South
Africans should take an interest in the Kiswahili language and its history.
Kiswahili can show South African languages the way forward. Kiswahili is a
success.
Kiswahili is spoken in 11 countries and has official status
in 5 of them: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and
the Union of the Comoros (where it is known as Comorian). The other countries
with first-language Swahili-speaking populations are: Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi,
Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. In most of these countries there are much larger
populations of second-language Kiswahili-speakers, who make use of the special,
useful and convenient characteristics of this great language.
As we will see in the next item, only four other languages
have comparable international reach in Africa, and they are all languages that
originated outside the continent. They are Arabic, Portuguese, French and
English.
Of the hundreds of indigenous African languages, only
Kiswahili has been able to grow in the modern period to compete with the former
colonial languages. This is why we can say it is unique and that it shows the
way forward for other African languages.
Kiswahili is a modern
language
The rise of Kiswahili has taken place in modern times.
Kiswahili is contemporary in this respect to three other languages that have
established themselves in the modern world: Modern Hebrew, Standard Modern
Greek and Afrikaans. All of these four languages have ancient origins, but
became what they are today in a deliberate phase of modern development starting
in the 19th Century, and consolidating in the 20th
Century.
Kiswahili has many
dictionaries
As far as we can ascertain, Kiswahili first broke through
the missionary barrier in 1981 with the publication of the “Kamusi ya Kiswahili
sanifu” (Standard Kiswahili Dictionary) in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. This
dictionary has been revised and re-published at least 43 times to date. It can
also be downloaded from the Internet.
The publication of “Kamusi ya Kiswahili sanifu”, known as
KKS, was met with great pride and joy by Kiswahili speakers everywhere. It has
been followed by many more monolingual Kiswahili dictionaries, some of them
derived from the KKS and others being substantially new projects. One publisher
alone offers five different monolingual Kiswahili dictionaries (see here).
Kiswahili has
literature
Kiswahili-language publications are abundant in all aspects
of literature from school and university books, to newspapers and magazines, to
poetry and novels and comics. Swahili language appears in drama and in song.
Kiswahili is still
growing
Because Kiswahili is a living language, with speakers,
writers, readers and dictionaries, it is able to expand its vocabulary and its
usages to accommodate modern life as it develops.
Kiswahili by
comparison
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of indigenous languages
spoken in Africa. Many of them are well known. We can mention Ovambo, Luba and
Lingala, Yoruba, Wolof and Ashanti, Baganda, Luo, Masai and Kikuyu, and many
Central and Southern African Languages including the nine indigenous official
languages of South Africa.
In none of these cases does it appear, as it does with
Kiswahili, that the major problems have been solved. On the contrary, in all
cases it appears that the commanding heights of the literary and most
conspicuously, political world are generally occupied by the four principal
former colonial languages: Arabic, Portuguese, French and English.
Projecting forward, it is hard to see how the indigenous
African languages will avoid a decline, or find a turning-point in that
decline. It is only with Kiswahili that we can see anything like an
international challenge to the former colonial tongues. That challenge rests
upon the vigour of scholarship and on its products, the monolingual Kiswahili
dictionaries, and upon the literary culture that is in turn buttressed by the
existence of monolingual dictionaries.
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