Journal Entry #8 - Origins of Swahili

[Alexis Witt]

It is sort of hard to find good information on the origins of Swahili because the origins are somewhat vague. Basically. I found that Swahili developed as Arabic and Persian traders came to Eastern Africa somewhere between 500 and 1000 AD. It began as a language to help traders barter with the natives. Eventually, it became a more popular language among the people in countries like Tanzania and Kenya. It is classified as a bantu language because of the syntax and sentence structure, but has influences from Turkish, Arabic, German, and English. Swahili was only really a spoken language until the British took control of German East Africa after WWI and encouraged people to write (according to one of our language partners). Therefore, there could be several correct spellings of a word, for instance asante and ahsante are both correct ways to spell thank you. Swahili is not generally someone's native language. It is generally a second language taught in primary schools. A child's first language is usually a tribal language; then a child learns Swahili in primary school; then English in secondary school (if a child is lucky enough to reach secondary school).

Knowing this helps me learn Swahili because it helps me make connections with other languages that I have already studied. I obviously pretty fluent in English, so it is easy to connect the english word Computer and the Swahili word Computa or the English word car to the Swahili word gari. I can also make connections between Spanish and Swahili for instance the spanish word for table is mesa and the Swahili word is meza.