Swahili Subtitling Services

Swahili, also known as Kiswahili, is a Bantu language and the first language of the Swahili people. It is a lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of Southeast Africa, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The closely related Comorian language, spoken in the Comoros Islands, is sometimes considered a dialect.

Although only around five to fifteen million people speak Swahili as their first language, it is used as alingua franca in much of Southeast Africa. Estimates of the total number of Swahili speakers vary widely, from 60 million to over 150 million. Swahili serves as a national of four nations: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its dialects are used as official languages in Comoros – Shikomor and Mayotte – Shimaore. It is also one of the official languages of the African Union and East African Community.

A significant fraction of Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic through contact with Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants of the Swahili Coast. It has also incorporated German, Portuguese, English,Hindustani and French words into its vocabulary through contact with empire builders, traders and slavers during the past five centuries.

Swahili is traditionally regarded as being the language of coastal areas of Tanzania and Kenya, formalised after independence by presidents of the African Great Lakes region. It was first spoken by natives of the coastal mainland and spread as a fisherman’s language to the various islands surrounding the Swahili Coast. Traders from these islands had extensive contact with the coastal peoples from at least the 2nd century A.D. and Swahili began to spread along the Swahili Coast from at least the 6th century. There is also cultural evidence of early Zaramo people settlement on Zanzibar from Dar-es-salaam in present-day Tanzania. The African population of the island holds the tradition that it is descended from these early settlers.

Clove farmers from Oman and the Persian Gulf farmed the Zanzibar Archipelago, slowly spreading Islam and adding a few words to Swahili language and building forts and castles in major trading and cultural centers as far as Sofala (Mozambique) and Kilwa (Tanzania) to the south, Mombasa andLamu in Kenya, the Comoros Islands and northern Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, and Barawa to the north in southern Somalia. Demand for cloves soon established permanent trade routes, and Swahili-speaking merchants settled in stops along the new trade routes. For the most part, this process started the development of the modern Swahili language. However, the spread was hampered during the European colonial era and did not occur west of Lake Malawi, in what was then called the Belgian Congo, and is now Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thus making it a secondary rather than a primary language in that region.

The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa in 1711 A.D. in the Arabic script. They were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. The original letters are now preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India. Another ancient written document is an epic poem in the Arabic script titled Utendi wa Tambuka (The History of Tambuka); it is dated 1728. However, the Latin script later became standard under the influence of European colonial powers.