The Swahili language also absorbed words from the Portuguese who controlled
the Swahili coastal towns (c. 1500-1700AD). Some of the words that the
Swahili language absorbed from the Portuguese include "leso"
(handkerchief), "meza" (table), "gereza" (prison), "pesa" ('peso', money),
etc. Swahili bull-fighting, still popular on the Pemba island, is also a
Portuguese legacy from that period.
http://www.glcom.com/hassan/swahili_history.htmlPortuguese influence in East African languages http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/.U31x9HjC2tY [Needs subscription to log-in] Jacqueline M Kiraithe and Nancy T Baden: The influence of the Portuguese language on African languages has been studied in such areas as Angola, Mozambique, and Senegal where Lusitanian colonies existed for some 400 years. The contact languages, dialects, and creole speech have been documented to a great degree. Less attention has been paid to the Swahili coast where Portuguese infleucne was felt to be minimal. Scholars have generally agreed that the Portuguese presence in the area left little more than a trace, with perhaps a half-dozen words in Swahili. As a result of detailed investigation, it can be demonstrated that the Portuguese language, particularly the lexicon, has left vestiges of nearly 150 words which can be authenticated in current speech and in contemporary dictionaries of Swahili and other languages spoken on or near the north-eastern coast of Africa. It is unfortunate that very little documentation can be provided for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the Portuguese were actively engaged in an attempt to dominate that portion of Africa. The study is organised as follows: (1) a brief survey of Portuguese contact in East Africa; (2) a presentation of the method of inquiry, i.e. dictionaries, etymological references, histories, native informants; (3) a description of the language families involved, including those notes on phological and morphological evolution which can be abstracted from the corpus of information; (4) a classification of the lexical items under consideration, including word sets, words with their possibile etymologies, and glosses of the items; and (5) conclusions which indicate that some 150 such words are currently verifiable in Swahili with approximately half of these having been carried further inland, probably by Swahili traders, where they entered into Luyia, Kikuyu, Kamba, Meru and Rundi....
