What countries have Swahili as an official language?

The exact number of Swahili speakers, be it native or second-language speakers, is unknown and a matter of debate. Various estimates have been put forward and they vary widely, from 50 million to over 100 million. Swahili serves as a national language of four nations: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the DRC. Shikomor, the official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (), is related to Swahili. Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and officially recognised as a lingua franca of the East African Community. South Africa legalized the teaching of Swahili in South African schools as an optional subject beginning in 2020.

Swahili language

Swahili, also known as (translation: language of the Swahili people), is a Bantu language and the first language of the Swahili people. It is a lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Comorian, spoken in the Comoros Islands is sometimes considered to be a dialect of Swahili, though other authorities consider it a distinct language.

A significant fraction of Swahili vocabulary derives from Arabic, in part conveyed by Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants. For example, the Swahili word for "book" is, traceable back to the Arabic word (from the root "k-t-b" "write"). However, the Swahili plural form of this word ("books") is, following Bantu grammar in which is reanalysed as a nominal class prefix, whose plural is.

Swahili in;Swahili is a Bantu language of the Sabaki branch. In Guthrie's geographic classification, Swahili is in Bantu zone G, whereas the other Sabaki languages are in zone E70, commonly under the name "Nyika." Local folk-theories of the language have often considered Swahili to be a mixed language because of its many loan words from Arabic, and the fact that Swahili people have historically been Muslims. However, historical linguists do not consider the Arabic influence on Swahili to be significant enough to classify it as a mixed language, since Arabic influence is limited to lexical items, most of which have only been borrowed after 1500, while the grammatical and syntactic structure of the language is typically Bantu.

Its old name was Kingozi, but as traders came from Arab countries, their vocabulary intermingled with the language. It was originally written in Arabic script.

The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa in 1711 in the Arabic script that were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. The original letters are preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India.

Its name came from Arabic: سَاحِل "sāħil" = "coast", broken plural سَوَاحِل "sawāħil" = "coasts", سَوَاحِلِىّ "sawāħilï" = "of coasts".

Since Swahili was the language of commerce in East Africa, the colonial administrators wanted to standardize it. In June 1928, an interterritorial conference attended by representatives of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar took place in Mombasa. The Zanzibar dialect was chosen as standard Swahili for those areas, and the standard orthography for Swahili was adopted.

Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three African Great Lakes countries (Tanzania, Kenya, and the DRC) where it is an official or national language. In 1985, with the 8-4-4 system of education, Swahili was made a compulsory subject in all Kenyan schools. Swahili and closely related languages are spoken by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Comoros, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia and Rwanda. The language was still understood in the southern ports of the Red Sea in the 20th century.

Some 80 percent of approximately 49 million Tanzanians speak Swahili in addition to their first languages. The five eastern provinces of the DRC are Swahili-speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese reportedly speak it. Swahili speakers may number 120 to 150 million in total.

Unlike the vast majority of Niger-Congo languages, Swahili lacks contrastive tone. As a result of that and the language's shallow orthography, Swahili is said to be the easiest African language for an English speaker to learn.

Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes:,,,, and. Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress, but they are pronounced in full as follows:Swahili also has the phonemes. "[I]n some Arabic loans (nouns, verbs, adjectives) emphasis or intensity is expressed by reproducing the original emphatic consonants and the uvular, or lengthening a vowel, where aspiration would be used in inherited Bantu words."

Swahili is currently written in an alphabet close to English, except it does not use the letters Q and X. There are two digraphs for native sounds, "ch" and "sh"; "c" is not used apart from unassimilated English loans and, occasionally, as a substitute for "k" in advertisements. There are also several digraphs for Arabic sounds not distinguished in pronunciation outside of traditional Swahili areas.

The language used to be written in the Arabic script. Unlike adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages, relatively little accommodation was made for Swahili. There were also differences in orthographic conventions between cities and authors and over the centuries, some quite precise but others different enough to cause difficulties with intelligibility.

Several Swahili consonants do not have equivalents in Arabic, and for them, often no special letters were created unlike, for example, Urdu script. Instead, the closest Arabic sound is substituted. Not only did that mean that one letter often stands for more than one sound, but also writers made different choices of which consonant to substitute. Here are some of the equivalents between Arabic Swahili and Roman Swahili:

That was the general situation, but conventions from Urdu were adopted by some authors so as to distinguish aspiration and from : 'gazelle', 'roof'. Although it is not found in Standard Swahili today, there is a distinction between dental and alveolar consonants in some dialects, which is reflected in some orthographies, for example in''to meet' vs.''to be satisfied'. A "k" with the dots of "y",, was used for "ch" in some conventions; "ky" being historically and even contemporaneously a more accurate transcription than Roman "ch". In Mombasa, it was common to use the Arabic emphatics for Cw, for example in'(standard ') 'we' and'(standard ') 'head'.

Word division differs from Roman norms. Particles such as'are joined to the following noun, and possessives such as'and'are joined to the preceding noun, but verbs are written as two words, with the subject and tense–aspect–mood morphemes separated from the object and root, as in'"he who told me".

The "ki-/vi-" class historically consisted of two separate genders, artefacts (Bantu class 7/8, utensils and hand tools mostly) and diminutives (Bantu class 12), which were conflated at a stage ancestral to Swahili. Examples of the former are "kisu" "knife", "kiti" "chair" (from "mti" "tree, wood"), "chombo" "vessel" (a contraction of "ki-ombo"). Examples of the latter are "kitoto" "infant", from "mtoto" "child"; "kitawi" "frond", from "tawi" "branch"; and "chumba" ("ki-umba") "room", from "nyumba" "house". It is the diminutive sense that has been furthest extended. An extension common to diminutives in many languages is "approximation" and "resemblance" (having a 'little bit' of some characteristic, like "-y" or "-ish" in English). For example, there is "kijani" "green", from "jani" "leaf" (compare English 'leafy'), "kichaka" "bush" from "chaka" "clump", and "kivuli" "shadow" from "uvuli" "shade". A 'little bit' of a verb would be an instance of an action, and such "instantiations" (usually not very active ones) are found: "kifo" "death", from the verb "-fa" "to die"; "kiota" "nest" from "-ota" "to brood"; "chakula" "food" from "kula" "to eat"; "kivuko" "a ford, a pass" from "-vuka" "to cross"; and "kilimia" "the Pleiades", from "-limia" "to farm with", from its role in guiding planting. A resemblance, or being a bit like something, implies marginal status in a category, so things that are marginal examples of their class may take the "ki-/vi-" prefixes. One example is "chura" ("ki-ura") "frog", which is only half terrestrial and therefore is marginal as an animal. This extension may account for disabilities as well: "kilema" "a cripple", "kipofu" "a blind person", "kiziwi" "a deaf person". Finally, diminutives often denote contempt, and contempt is sometimes expressed against things that are dangerous. This might be the historical explanation for "kifaru" "rhinoceros", "kingugwa" "spotted hyena", and "kiboko" "hippopotamus" (perhaps originally meaning "stubby legs").

Another class with broad semantic extension is the "m-/mi-" class (Bantu classes 3/4). This is often called the 'tree' class, because "mti, miti" "tree(s)" is the prototypical example. However, it seems to cover vital entities neither human nor typical animals: trees and other plants, such as "mwitu" 'forest' and "mtama"'millet' (and from there, things made from plants, like "mkeka"'mat'); supernatural and natural forces, such as "mwezi"'moon', "mlima"'mountain', "mto" 'river'; active things, such as "moto" 'fire', including active body parts ("moyo" 'heart', "mkono" 'hand, arm'); and human groups, which are vital but not themselves human, such as "mji" 'village', and, by analogy, "mzinga" 'beehive/cannon'. From the central idea of "tree", which is thin, tall, and spreading, comes an extension to other long or extended things or parts of things, such as "mwavuli" 'umbrella', "moshi"'smoke', "msumari" 'nail'; and from activity there even come active instantiations of verbs, such as "mfuo" "metal forging", from "-fua" "to forge", or "mlio" "a sound", from "-lia" "to make a sound". Words may be connected to their class by more than one metaphor. For example, "mkono" is an active body part, and "mto" is an active natural force, but they are also both long and thin. Things with a trajectory, such as "mpaka" 'border' and "mwendo" 'journey', are classified with long thin things, as in many other languages with noun classes. This may be further extended to anything dealing with time, such as "mwaka" 'year' and perhaps "mshahara" 'wages'. Animals exceptional in some way and so not easily fitting in the other classes may be placed in this class.

The other classes have foundations that may at first seem similarly counterintuitive. In short,

Swahili phrases agree with nouns in a system of concord, but if the noun refers to a human, they accord with noun classes 1-2 regardless of their noun class. Verbs agree with the noun class of their subjects and objects; adjectives, prepositions and demonstratives agree with the noun class of their nouns. In Standard Swahili "(Kiswahili sanifu)", based on the dialect spoken in Zanzibar, the system is rather complex; however, it is drastically simplified in many local variants where Swahili is not a native language, such as in Nairobi. In non-native Swahili, concord reflects only animacy: human subjects and objects trigger "a-, wa-" and "m-, wa-" in verbal concord, while non-human subjects and objects of whatever class trigger "i-, zi-". Infinitives vary between standard "ku-" and reduced "i-." ("Of" is animate "wa" and inanimate "ya, za.")

In Standard Swahili, human subjects and objects of whatever class trigger animacy concord in "a-, wa-" and "m-, wa-," and non-human subjects and objects trigger a variety of gender-concord prefixes.

This list is based on "Swahili and Sabaki: a linguistic history".

Modern standard Swahili is based on "Kiunguja," the dialect spoken in Zanzibar Town, but there are numerous dialects of Swahili, some of which are mutually unintelligible, such as the following:

Maho (2009) considers these to be distinct languages:
The rest of the dialects are divided by him into two groups:

Maho includes the various Comorian dialects as a third group. Most other authorities consider Comorian to be a Sabaki language, distinct from Swahili.

In Somalia, where the Afroasiatic Somali language predominates, a variant of Swahili referred to as Chimwiini (also known as Chimbalazi) is spoken along the Benadir coast by the Bravanese people. Another Swahili dialect known as Kibajuni also serves as the mother tongue of the Bajuni minority ethnic group, which lives in the tiny Bajuni Islands as well as the southern Kismayo region.

In Oman, there are an estimated 22,000 people who speak Swahili. Most are descendants of those repatriated after the fall of the Sultanate of Zanzibar.

Over 100 different languages are spoken in Tanzania, making it the most linguistically diverse country in East Africa. Among the languages spoken in Tanzania are all four of Africa's language families: Bantu, Cushitic, Nilotic, and Khoisan. Swahili and English are Tanzania's official languages. Swahili belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo family. The Sandawe people speak a language that may be related to the Khoe languages of Botswana and Namibia, while the language of the Hadzabe people, although it has similar click consonants, is arguably a language isolate. The language of the Iraqw people is Cushitic. Other languages are Indian languages and Portuguese (spoken by Goans and Mozambicans).

Demographics of Tanzania

This article is about the demographic features of the population of Tanzania, including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations, and other aspects of the population.

The population distribution in Tanzania is extremely uneven. Most people live on the northern border or the eastern coast, with much of the remainder of the country being sparsely populated. Density varies from in the Katavi Region to in Dar es Salaam. Approximately 70 percent of the population is rural, although this percentage has been declining since at least 1967. Dar es Salaam is the "de facto" capital and largest city. Dodoma, located in the centre of Tanzania, is the "de jure" capital, although action to move government buildings to Dodoma has stalled..

The population consists of about 125 ethnic groups. The Sukuma, Nyamwezi, Chagga, and Haya peoples have more than 1 million members each.

Although much of Zanzibar's native population came from the mainland, one group known as Shirazis traces its origins to the island's early Persian settlers. Non-Africans residing on the mainland and Zanzibar account for 1 percent of the total population. The Asian community, including Hindus, Sikhs, Shi'a and Sunni Muslims, Parsis, and Goans, has declined by 50 percent in the 2000s and early 2010s to 50,000 on the mainland and 4,000 on Zanzibar. An estimated 70,000 Arabs and 20,000 Europeans (90 percent of which are from the British diaspora) reside in Tanzania.

Based on 1999–2003 data, over 74,000 Tanzanian-born people were living in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, with 32,630 residing in the United Kingdom; 19,960 in Canada; 12,225 in the United States; 1,714 in Australia; 1,180 in the Netherlands; and 1,012 in Sweden.

According to the 2012 census, the total population was 44,928,923 compared to 12,313,469 in 1967, resulting in an annual growth rate of 2.9 percent. The under 15 age group represented 44.1 percent of the population, with 35.5 percent being in the 15–35 age group, 52.2 percent being in the 15–64 age group, and 3.8 percent being older than 64.

According to the 2012 revision of the World Population Prospects, children below the age of 15 constituted 44.8 percent of the total population, with 52.0 percent aged 15–64 and 3.1 percent aged 65 or older.

Structure of the population (01.07.2013) (Estimates) :

The Tanzanian Demographic and Health Survey 2010 estimated that the infant mortality rate for 2005–10 was 51. Registration of other vital events in Tanzania is not complete. The Population Department of the United Nations prepared the following estimates.

Births and deaths

Source:

Total Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) and Crude Birth Rate (CBR):

Fertility rates are estimated by Surveys (TDHS) and Census in different times.
TDHS surveys estimated these fertility rates :6.3 (1991–92), 5.8 (1996), 5.7 (2004–05), 5.4 (2010)
and 2002 Census said 6.3

The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.

Note: Estimates for this country explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher death rates, lower population growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected.

"total:" 17.3 years
"male:" 17.0 years
"female:" 17.6 years (2013 estimate)

"at birth:" 1.03 male(s)/female
"0-14 years:" 1.02 male(s)/female
"15–54 years:" 1.00 male(s)/female
"55-64 years:" 0.75 male(s)/female
"65 years and over:" 0.76 male(s)/female
"total population:" 0.99 male(s)/female (2013 estimate)

"total population:" 60.76 years
"male:" 59.48 years
"female:" 62.09 years (2013 estimate)

Age 15-49 HIV infection rates:

People living with HIV/AIDS:

Deaths:"definition:"
age 15 and over can read and write Swahili, English, or Arabic
"total population:" 69.4%
"male:" 77.5%
"female:" 62.2% (2003 est.)

Most Tanzanians are nowadays Christians and Muslims. The numerical relationship between followers of the two religions is regarded as politically sensitive and questions about religious affiliation have not been included in census questionnaires since 1967.

For many years estimates have been repeated that about a third of the population each follows Islam, Christianity and traditional religions.
As there is likely no longer such a large percentage of traditional religionists, a range of competing estimates has been published giving one side or the other a large share or trying to show equal shares.

Estimates from the Pew Report Islam and Christianity (2010) were 60% Christian and 36% Muslim.

The remainder of the population are Hindus, Buddhists, animists, and unaffiliated. Most Christians are Roman Catholic, Lutheran or Seventh-Day Adventist, though a number of other Pentecostal churches, Anglicans, and Eastern Orthodox Christians are also represented in the country. Most Tanzanian Muslims are Sunni, though there are also populations of Ibadi, Shia, Ahamadiya, Bohora, and Sufi. Muslims are concentrated in coastal areas and in mainland areas along former caravan trade routes.

Today both countries enjoy healthy relations. Both countries are inhabited by the world's largest Swahili speaking populations, Swahili is the official and national language in both countries. Kenya and Tanzania share a lot of cultural similarities.

Kenya–Tanzania relations

Kenya–Tanzania relations are bilateral relations between Tanzania and Kenya. Tanzania is a strategic partner of Kenya in many areas, particularly trade, security (military), education, agriculture and energy.

Tanzania maintains a high commission in Nairobi and Kenya in Dar es Salaam.

The first high commissions of Kenya in Tanzania and vice versa were opened after the independence of Kenya. However, after the breakup of the EAC in 1977 both countries severed diplomatic ties. The breakup of the first EAC which was founded in 1967 was brought about by ideological differences between Tanzania and Kenya. As it was during the cold war African countries were making decisions on whether to become socialist or capitalist. Kenya's leader Kenyatta was intent on making sure that Kenya wouldn't become socialist and Kenya stuck to capitalism. Tanzania on the other hand championed for Ujamaa, a major African socialist policy.

Tanzania and Kenya resumed diplomatic ties in 1983. By that time, a lot of factors were slowing the idea of Ujamaa in Tanzania among them the war with Uganda and many other social factors.

President Kikwete of Tanzania has on multiple occasions made state visits to Kenya. He even addressed the Kenyan Parliament. Former President Mwai Kibaki and Incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta have made state visits to Tanzania.

In September 2014, Tanzania became the largest export destination of Kenyan goods within East Africa. Kenya's total exports to Tanzania in 2011 were valued at 488 million U.S. dollars as compared to 390 million dollars in 2010. Kenya's imports from Tanzania were valued at 185.4 million dollars in 2011, an increase from 126 million dollars in 2010. In the years between 2007-2008 Tanzanian exports to Kenya increased by 17%. The balance of trade still favours Kenya.

Many Kenyan firms have operations in Tanzania. Some of which are Kenya Airways, Kenya Commercial Bank (Tanzania), Equity Bank (Tanzania) and Nakumatt.

In 2009 Kenyan investment was estimated at over Kes. 160 billion (US$2 billion) making Kenya the second largest FDI contributors in Tanzania.

Tanzania and Kenya are connected by road and rail. A massive amount of money has been allocated to upgrade and maintain the infrastructure that connects both countries. At one time, President Uhuru Kenyatta made one of his state visits to Tanzania by road.

On 7 July 2000, Tanzania and Kenya along with Uganda reestablished the EAC. The EAC has contributed a great deal in improving trade and overall relations between both countries.

Kenya and Tanzania have been at odds over economic and logistic issues, with traders from both countries rivaling each other. Despite both countries being part of the East African Community, border checks and conflicts have resulted in occasional unrest and protests along the border.