Language
The Swahili speak Swahili as their native tongue, which is a member of the Bantu subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family. Its closest relatives include Comorian spoken on the Comoros Islands and the Mijikenda language of the Mijikenda people in Kenya.
With its original speech community centered on the coastal parts of Zanzibar, Kenya and Tanzania, a seaboard referred to as the Swahili Coast, the Bantu Swahili language contains many Arabic loan-words as a consequence of interactions with Arab migrants. Swahili became the tongue of the urban class in the Great Lakes region, and eventually went on to serve as a lingua franca there during the post-colonial period.
Read more about this topic: Swahili People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)