Kiswahili originated in east Africa, spreading around the continent and the globe. It’s been adopted as a working language at the African Union and there’s a push for it to become Africa’s lingua franca or common language.
Morgan J. Robinson is a historian of east Africa with a research focus on language who has published a book on Kiswahili called A Language for the World. We asked her how today’s accepted standard version of Kiswahili came into being.
Where is Kiswahili spoken?
Kiswahili is spoken across eastern and central Africa. Mother-tongue speakers are found mainly along the coast, but Kiswahili is spoken as a second or third language by people around the world. According to Unesco, which in 2021 proclaimed 7 July as World Kiswahili Language Day, it’s spoken by 200 million people.
What led to it becoming so prominent?
Kiswahili’s role as a prominent symbolic and practical language in Africa is the result of multiple factors. These range from political and economic to cultural and historical. Already by the 1800s Kiswahili was being used all along the caravan trade network that crisscrossed east-central Africa.
In the centuries before this, the language had been used to formulate legal, philosophical and poetic contributions that influenced the entire Indian Ocean world.
But one of the arguments of my book is that the creation of a standardized version of the language resulted in the mid-1900s in a version of Kiswahili that was more portable than ever before. A standard language is a uniform written version that is generally recognized as the “official” form. This comes with the creation of dictionaries, grammar and literature that allow this version to travel further.
Another important part of the story of the standardization of Kiswahili is that it was central to a variety of community-building projects across the course of a century. It was used by formerly enslaved students and missionaries alongside native speakers on Zanzibar and was central as a language of administration in Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Kenya and parts of Uganda during the colonial period.
Kiswahili also played a political role in the anti-colonial movements of eastern Africa and among southern African freedom fighters who trained in Tanzania in the 1960s and 1970s. It was even embraced by some US civil rights activists.
All these communities used the language at various times to strengthen ties and communicate across barriers that otherwise might have kept people apart. This led not only to an increase in the number of people speaking and writing Kiswahili, but also to its reputation as a potential pan-African and even global connecting language.
SOURCE: theconversation.com