Swahili Translations

POZENA’s professional Swahili translations

• Swahili is a member of the Bantu languages group, which is part of the Niger-Congo language family. This language began to evolve on the eastern coast of Africa most likely in the 8th century AD with the arrival of the Bantu peoples from Central Africa, who interacted with the settlers from the Arabic Peninsula (hence there are Arabic influences in Swahili). In the colonial period, Kiswahili developed largely thanks to the British administration, whose members used the language to communicate with the indigenous population. In the 20th century, Swahili served as an identity marker of Tanzanians and Kenyans when their countries became sovereign states.
• Swahili is a highly diversified language. Some of its varieties are not intelligible to speakers of Kiswahili from more remote geographical regions. The standard variety is based on the Kiunguja dialect spoken in Zanzibar. Swahili is regulated by the National Swahili Council (BAKITA) in Tanzania and the National Kiswahili Association (CHAKITA) in Kenya.
• Swahili is an official language of the African Union and the East African Community.

• Swahili is an agglutinative language in which affixes (usually prefixes) are added to the root of the word. Therefore, form changes occur at the beginning of words rather than at the end. For example, ninasoma means “I read”. The root soma (Eng. read) has been prefixed with the morphemes ni (first person singular marker) and na (present tense marker).
• There are no grammatical genders in Swahili. However, the language has as many as 18 noun classes (in actuality 15 are employed), such as people, plants, animals, artefacts, animals, abstract concepts, etc.
• Swahili relies on a system of concord. Grammatical forms in a sentence or a phrase agree with the noun class (i.e. the prefix of the noun), e.g. mtoto mmoja mzuri (Eng. one pretty child) and kitabu kimoja kizuri (Eng. one pretty book).
• Around 23% of Swahili vocabulary has originated from Arabic. However, basic vocabulary used in everyday communication has native roots.
• The most common Swahili loanword is arguably safari, whose exact meaning in Kiswahili is journey.