Swahili · Kiswahili

About Swahili

Language family

Niger-Congo, Bantu

Where it's spoken

East Africa — Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, the DRC, and beyond

Speakers

roughly 200 million speakers, mostly as a second language

Swahili grew out of Bantu languages along the East African coast, heavily enriched with Arabic loanwords from over a thousand years of Indian Ocean trade contact, and later absorbed some Portuguese, Hindi, and English vocabulary as well. It is an official language of the African Union and the most widely used lingua franca in East Africa, spoken as a first or second language across national and ethnic lines. Its Bantu grammar — noun classes and prefix agreement — is shared with hundreds of other African languages, even where vocabulary differs completely.