SWAHILI CENTRE

An Introduction to SwahiliCentre Website and Blog:

 

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Welcome to Swahili Centre – The purpose of this website is to provide you with a brief introduction to Swahili Culture, Swahili History, Swahili Religions, Swahili Language and Learning Tools - including  Swahili Translation, Shared Swahili Stories and Swahili Music just to name a few.

You don’t have to have been born in Africa in order for you to speak the Swahili Language or understand the Swahili Culture. If you’ve got the motivation and the desire to learn, this site will provide you with all the inspiration you need.

As time progresses you will find thousands of Swahili stories and photos of travelers to Africa, their experiences with the Swahili people, culture, and their travel’s experiences and tips in places they have visited (hotels, transportation, food .. ) and people they meet along the way.

In addition, this site is intended to provide free Swahili learning resources to help facilitate your learning and understanding of the Swahili language and culture for those of you who are interested in travelling to Africa as well as stories around the world of people who have interacted or are connected with the Swahili people or culture in one way or another.

About Swahili Language:

Swahili (called Kiswahili in the language itself) is the first language of the Swahili people (Waswahili), who inhabit several large stretches of the Indian Ocean coastline from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique, including the Comoros Islands.

Although only 5-10 million people speak it as their native language, Swahili is a lingua franca of much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a national or official language of four nations, and is the only African language among the official working languages of the African Union.

Swahili Language Kiswahili is Spoken in:

Tanzania,Kenya,Uganda,Rwanda,Burundi,Congo(DRC),Somalia,Oman,Comoros Islands (including Mayotte)and Mozambique.

Total speakers: First language: 5-10 million and Second language: 80 million

Swahili is spoken natively by various groups traditionally inhabiting about 1,500 miles of the East African coastline. About 35% of the Swahili vocabulary derives from the Arabic language, resulting from the fact that the language evolved through centuries of contact between Arabic-speaking traders and many different Bantu-speaking peoples inhabiting Africa’s Indian Ocean coast. It also has incorporated Persian, German, Indian and English words into its vocabulary due to contact with these different groups of people.

Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three countries, Tanzania, Kenya, and Congo (DRC), where it is an official or national language. The neighboring nation of Uganda made Swahili a required subject in primary schools in 1992 — although this mandate has not been well implemented — and declared it an official language in 2005. Swahili, or other closely related languages, is also used by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Rwanda, Mozambique, Somalia, and Zambia, and nearly the entire population of the Comoros.

Thanks to visitor submissions, this site is growing larger and larger by the day.

Enjoy the photos and tips on this site, and please feel free to share your own Swahili experiences with the rest of the world and by so doing help make this world a better place.

Please visit this site often as this site is updated frequently.

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