Difference between revisions of "Swahili"

Revision as of 22:44, July 2, 2008

Swahili is a Bantu language widely spoken in East Africa. Swahili is spoken as a first language by about 5 million people, and also serves as a lingua franca across Africa, where it is spoken by over 30 million people as a second language^[1].

Swahili arose as a complex hybrid of Bantu language and Arabic, and spread thanks to intense trade, including in slaves, between the Arab peninsula and eastern Africa.

Syntactically, Swahili is largely Verb complex-object^[2]. Because Swahili is an agglutinative language, the subject and verb combine through prefixes and suffixes, creating the Verb complex.

References

1. ↑ http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/september/swahili.html
2. ↑ http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/september/swahili.html#stru