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
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—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
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