LANGUAGES, Part 5

 

05 Kiswahili in at least 11 countries.GIF

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
<http://www.oxford.co.ke/kamusi-za-kiswahili> ).

 

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. 

 

.        To download any of the files in this course, please use this link:
https://sites.google.com/site/cu2012courses2/26-languages

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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