Swahili

Karibu! Welcome to a page focusing on the Swahili culture and language.

The word "Africa" origins from Latin and Greek. Originally it only described the area today known as Tunesia, but eventually it became a name for the whole continent. This could be one of the reasons of the (still) common misunderstanding that Africa is one, uniform "country". Truth is that more than 1,500 different languages are still spoken in Africa -and the many people of Africa has very different histories and culture.

Kiswahili is one of the most widely-spoken African languages (probably more than 20 million people speak Kiswahili). Kiswahili is the official language of both Tanzania and Kenya. It is also spoken as a lingua franca in many other countries in East and Central Africa. Kiswahili is not an original tribal language, but a "new" bantu language with influence from Arabic, Portugese and English.

Other Bantu languages (all over Africa) has some similarities with Kiswahili. The language has the potential to be a pan-african language. if you want to travel or work in Africa some knowledge of Swahili would probably be a good idea.

Swahili sources on the web

The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary

...is a very impressive and professional dictionary/research project. The Kamusi project from Yale University can not be missed if you are interested in Swahili.
Check it out here

BBC Kiswahili

BBC World offers online news in Kiswahili. Not bad at all. Go to BBC Kiswahili. BBC also hosts the Story Of Africa which has a good chapter on the history of the Swahili culture.

Swahili discussion group

Interested in learning the Kiswahili language? Join the Kiswahili group.

Learning Swahili on Zanzibar

Visit ZanzibarNet.

More Swahili links

Check out Moja.com/swahili for more usefull links. Moja.com is an online "newspaper and information source for East Africa".

Learning Kiswahili

Teach Yourself Swahili

A book and audio casette for self study. Buy it from Amazon.

Concise Swahili and English Dictionary

Swahili-English/English-Swahili good a simple for the beginner. From "Teach Yourself..."

Swahili phrasebook

A smaller travel dictionary from Lonely Planet. Order it here...

Kiswahili

A comprehensive manual intended to teach students the basics of communicating in Swahili at an elementary level.

Check out more books about the swahili language and culture from Amazon.

The big package

A good (and expensive) way of learning Kiswahili could very well be the CD-rom/book package from Rosetta Stone Language Library.

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