How Swahili became Africa's most spoken language
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Majority of Kenyans and East-africans are multi-lingual and they will speak on average 3 languages (English, Kiswahili, the mother-tongue and most likely an additional local language.) if they are Bantu, they will also understand 3 or more other languages and same if they are Nilotic or Cushitic.
If your are foreigner, visiting for tourism - you will very much unlikely understand Kenyans! and if you are a foreigner of they type " i lived in Kenya for 10 years" most likely in a posh residence in Nairobi or Mombasa -- Kenyans are likely to have spoken to you in English throughout! Do not mistake that for the idea that Kenyans only speak in English - remember i said majority are multilingual and given that we have over 42 different languages - the language that mostly unites us is Swahili - it is also deemed less elitist.
The language is spoken across the entire East africa - (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique (Swahili name - Msumbiji), Burundi, Rwanda and Eastern DRC Congo.)
The article is an excerpt from a more detailed book and I agree with most it - but the author could have done a better job at investigating the origin of the language and early spread. It has borrowed heavily from Bantu, Arabic (countless words) and Portuguese (e.g. Pesa - money in Swahili, Meza - a table in Swahili).
The impression what is commonly spoken is very much biased by this assumption. Many just don't speak one language all day long.
As a Kenyan I found this read quite delightful, containing a lot I didn't know of the history of a language we speak.
> Nyerere personally translated two of William Shakespeare’s plays into Swahili to demonstrate the capacity of Swahili to bear the expressive weight of great literary works.
What happens when few people meet? How do you agree which language to use?
When someone advertises that they will speak in public do they announce in what language?
For me, when I lived in Kenya English was the lingua franca for official/business activity. Some older professional Kenyans I knew learned Swahili only after learning English (and their mother language, Luo for instance). On the street, Swahili was standard.
The Tanzanians I met however, considered Nairobi Swahili not even 'real' Swahili and more of a mish-mash for disparate speakers who might otherwise choose their mother tongue when possible.
And then there's Sheng - a creole that is an even further evolution from Swahili and various other languages.
In my experience, Swahili wasn't widely spoken, really only in a region of East Africa around Uganda/Kenya/Tanzania - which I also realized many foreigners come to think of as "Africa" because that's where they go on safari. It was great to drive from Tanzania into Burundi, or Ethiopia into Djibouti and not see a single foreigner for a month.
Certainly French is the language of the West Coast and of many hundreds of millions of people. I'm guessing if it also had Nigeria's 200million it would be the dominant language on the continent.
English, again, is common in the places tourists frequent, but otherwise not widespread outside the capital cities.
The vast majority of people even in very, very remote mud hut communities spoke at least two languages. 3+ was very common.
People in Africa fluidly switch languages mid-conversation or even mid-sentence. In DRC for example, it's common to see a conversation in French and Swahili, or French and Lingala, or Lingala and Swahili. But most people will make an effort to stick to French when talking to a foreigner.
I've also heard Kenyans say that Congolese people speak Swahili weird because they use French loanwords.
Not to detract anything from the article or Swahili, but surely this must be the case for English as well? Wikipedia on "English language" says:
Native speakers: 360–400 million L2 speakers: 750 million
The article itself admits that "Africa’s Swahili-speaking zone now extends across a full third of the continent." That excludes two-thirds of the continent.
For example, in South Africa, there are a whopping eleven official languages, including Xhosa and Zulu (both so-called "Bantu" languages like Swahili), but Swahili is not one of them.
The same is true of most other Southern African countries: Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
As another example, Wikipedia has a list of 46 (!) languages spoken in Angola: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Angola . Swahili is not included.
There has been an effort to begin teaching Swahili in schools in both South Africa and Botswana, at least. But such efforts don't have a good track record of success. Take a look at Ireland, where students are taught the Irish language in school but, for the most part, are terrible at it. It seems unlikely that imposing a language on countries that don't natively speak it will succeed.
Are you implying that Bantu languages don't exist?
In South Africa during apartheid, Bantu was used as a synonym for Black. The "self governing" regions were known as Bantustans and so on.
Like with most words, Bantu has a neutral actual meaning, but it's been corrupted by use and would not typically be used by a polite (white) person today - at least in Southern Africa.
(Ignore the first sentence)
Beyond that, "Bantu" is a colonial term, coined by German colonist Wilhelm Bleek. Bleek has been described as "the first serious thinker about and systematic theorist of ‘race’ in colonial South Africa." He studied African languages but called them "primitive", comparing them to the communication of non-human primates.
Not surprisingly given this history, the word "Bantu" was notoriously used by the apartheid government of South Africa as a catch-all term for indigenous people, regardless of their actual ethnicity.
But somehow, linguists haven't gotten any of these memos and continue to use the term to describe a family of languages. That may be because Western linguistics has deeply racist roots:
> Western linguistics particularly its study of Eurasian languages, arose against a background of Eurocentrism, colonial racism, nationalism and related theories, later espoused by Nazism and other White Supremacy movements. The following article argues that significant traces of this racism remain in contemporary Indology and South Asian lingustics—casting a long shadow over how the world is viewed.
Read my original comment as, "don't exist as a category."
> Beyond that, "Bantu" is a colonial term, coined by German colonist Wilhelm Bleek.
Per wikipedia, he came up with the name Bantu from a hypothetical reconstruction of the word "people" in the proto-Bantu language. So regardless of his politics or ideology, the term itself seems rather innocuous in origin.
Having said that, if it has picked up racist connotations, feel free to suggest an alternative term. The "so-called Bantu language family" seems rather unwieldy.
Or, because linguists aren’t crazy Twitter-obsessed kids who want to purify everything.
No. Superficially it may seem like it but practically it would stagnate their native languages and dumb down the population.
> There are more resources, technical and otherwise, available in English than Swahili.
Yes there is. But the exercise of translating resources to your own language helps advance a language and a peoples. A few days ago we had a submission about how some of the translators of goethe became some of the best english writers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523802
All you have to do is look at the resurgence of europe and european culture as europe "abandoned" latin in favor of the native languages. We wouldn't have shakespeare without the push towards linguistic nationalism - the move to translate bible, etc to one's own native language.
> I wonder what the income effect of knowing English is for an Indian, compared to someone who only knows Hindi. I'd guess that it's significant.
It depends on whether india supports an english-first system or hindi first system. Besides only a small fraction of jobs within each country requires english.
English dependence can be viewed as why india and so much of africa is so poor and undeveloped. You need a healthy amount of national pride to develop your country. Japan, South Korea, China, etc developed through their own languages.
Doesn't mean I think everyone should abandon english. Learn what you want, but foster and develop your own languages.
You’re totally cherry picking your examples, to the point that no one can take what you wrote seriously at all. Afghanistan has their own language, Amazon tribes even have their own language…how are those countries/areas doing right now?
Got any stats or studies that prove this otherwise ridiculously naive statement?
> it was to prefer English over Swahili as a 'lingua-franca' across regions.
That's what I'm against. And it's a good thing england didn't prefer french ( lingua-franca ) over its native language or we'd all be speaking french. It's a good thing descartes was translated into english rather than everyone speaking french. From a practical standpoint, it just makes sense to prioritize your native language.
Even if there's such a correlation (which I'm not convinced of) it's probably not cause and effect but both caused by colonisation.
That seems like a ridiculous assertion. How about Ireland?
Only 14% of Indians speak english.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
I lived in Tanzania for a couple years and learned a bit of swahili and the lack of online resources is a huge barrier for education. If you only know Swahili, the world is very small.
My experience is rather narrow, but besides some very young (pre 1st grade) children who only spoke their tribal language (Request: If anyone is offering online tutoring in Sesotho, I’d love to get contacted), I never encountered anyone who didn’t speak English.
>>> English dependence can be viewed as why india and so much of africa is so poor and undeveloped. You need a healthy amount of national pride to develop your country. Japan, South Korea, China, etc developed through their own languages.
No just national pride is not enough to develop. "development" is a complex issue which can't be boiled down to one or two reasons.
This makes no sense. The USA primarily speaks the language of a country an ocean away that they fought multiple wars against.
Less than 10% of Americans claim English ancestry. There were later waves that dwarfed English immigration.
Cultural center dentity is all well and good but should take a back seat to economic prosperity.
Arguments using emotionally loaded terms like "languages of the people who were trading you like cattle " move the focus from prosperity to social justice.
After all, when making the reverse argument in favour of English, you wouldn't want to hear "why push for a language best suited to trading cattle"?
As much as you may want cultural heritage, it's better for the individual to be fluent in English than in Swahili.
I'm not african and I'm not even sure if my hypothesis is close to the truth, however, trying to make historical facts disappear because they are not pretty is not how it works.
When talking about heritage in regard to the english language, don't forget that it is not their heritage or at least that their heritage is french and arabic as well.
My ancestors were. Go back far enough in any populations geneaology, and you'll find something similar.
> I'm not african and I'm not even sure if my hypothesis is close to the truth, however, trying to make historical facts disappear because they are not pretty is not how it works.
Who advocated for that? No, seriously, where did you read that historical facts should be "disappeared"?
> When talking about heritage in regard to the english language, don't forget that it is not their heritage or at least that their heritage is french and arabic as well.
So? Having a heritage (and everyone's got one) doesn't mean that it's the most important thing to have, or preserve.
I advocated that economic prosperity is a higher priority than conservative values.
I don't know how anyone can disagree with that.
So I mean maybe, but given the above that's a bit of a challenge.
"According to the UN, the language had its origins in East Africa, and Swahili speakers are spread over more than 14 countries: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Sudan, Somalia, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Comoros, and as far as Oman and Yemen in the Middle East.
Southern African countries such as South Africa and Botswana have introduced it in schools, while Namibia and others are considering doing so."
https://www.youtube.com/c/SabbaticalTommy
It's interesting how often he's able to get by in basic day to day with Swahili vs having to use something else.
There's also another channel by his sometimes partner who's a local from Uganda.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLquhsm3whhDUY23S3WJCSQ/vid...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A (Original from Civ 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17svtURunUk (my preferred version)