Swahili
proper noun
- Bantu language, mostly spoken mainly within East Africa, national language in Tanzania and one of the official languages of Kenya
- standard Swahili
Wiktionary
Pronunciation: /swəˈhiːli/ / /swɑˈhili/ / /swəˈhili/
name
Etymology: Borrowed from Swahili Mswahili / Kiswahili, from Arabic سَوَاحِلِيّ (sawāḥiliyy, “(people) of the coasts”), from سَوَاحِل (sawāḥil, “coasts”), broken plural of سَاحِل (sāḥil, “coast”).
- An agglutinative language of the Bantu branch widely spoken in East Africa. Born in its modern form from the hybridization of the Arabic and Bantu cultures, it was the language of the traders in East Africa, and spread along the routes of trade.
“On Tuesday night at the Club Serene in Brooklyn, Mayor Koch proclaimed Kwanzaa Week in New York. Then he told the crowd of about 400 that he had practiced his Swahili in order to pronounce correctly such exotic-sounding words as kujichagulia (self-determination), ujamaa (cooperative economics) and imani (faith), the theme of Kwanzaa '83.”
“Similarly, Swahili evolved as the trading language in East Africa and is described as having an Arab vocabulary upon an African grammar.”
noun
Etymology: Borrowed from Swahili Mswahili / Kiswahili, from Arabic سَوَاحِلِيّ (sawāḥiliyy, “(people) of the coasts”), from سَوَاحِل (sawāḥil, “coasts”), broken plural of سَاحِل (sāḥil, “coast”).
- A member of various ethnic groups — mainly Bantu, Afro-Arab and Comorian — inhabiting the Swahili coast.
“The Swahilis are a unique and important community that began to form before the arrival of Islam, as a result of intermarriage between Arab traders who came to the coast and women from local ethnic groups.”
“The final sources for the early history of the Swahili are the oral traditions related by them about their own past.”