Swahili language

“Swahili” in English (or “Kiswahili” in Swahili) is the mother tongue of the Swahili people; Swahili is spoken largely in East African coast. It is the official language of Tanzania and Kenya and is widely spoken in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Comoros Islands. It’s also spoken by smaller numbers in Burundi, Rwanda, Northern Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique.

Swahili is a Bantu language believed to have origin inspired by other languages, especially Arabic due to historical interactions between Arabs from the Middle East and East Africans. The name “Kiswahili” comes from the plural sawahili of the Arabic word sahil, which means boundaries or coast. With ki- at the beginning of the word, Kiswahili means coastal language.

A thousand years of contact between Indian Ocean peoples and Swahili resulted in a large number of borrowed words entering the language, mainly from Arabic, but also from other languages such as Persian and various Indian languages. At different periods Swahili also borrowed vocabulary from Portuguese and English.

Swahili alphabet

The oldest preserved Swahili literature, which dates from the early 18th century, is written in the Arabic script. Swahili is currently written in an alphabet close to English (Latin script), except it does not use the letters Q and X.

There is no special character in the Swahili language, so it’s typed simply using any font that supports the Basic Latin character set

Applications support Swahili

Swahili language supported by many translation tools (e.g., SDL Trados, memQ, Google translate, Idiom, Microsoft Translator, etc.)

Additionally, Swahili text appears correctly in many layout applications (e.g., Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, QuarkXPress, etc.) However, there is no Swahili dictionary in any of these applications.