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Am Kenyan - Born and raised and I lived at the Kenyan Coast. Kiswahili is very widely spoken and loved here. I studied Kiswahili as a language and i very much a
by georgeg 5y ago
Am Kenyan - Born and raised and I lived at the Kenyan Coast. Kiswahili is very widely spoken and loved here. I studied Kiswahili as a language and i very much admire the rich vocabulary and idioms. It is both a national and an official language in Kenya and most of Eastern Africa.
Majority of Kenyans and East-africans are multi-lingual and they will speak on average 3 languages (English, Kiswahili, the mother-tongue and most likely an additional local language.) if they are Bantu, they will also understand 3 or more other languages and same if they are Nilotic or Cushitic.
If your are foreigner, visiting for tourism - you will very much unlikely understand Kenyans! and if you are a foreigner of they type " i lived in Kenya for 10 years" most likely in a posh residence in Nairobi or Mombasa -- Kenyans are likely to have spoken to you in English throughout! Do not mistake that for the idea that Kenyans only speak in English - remember i said majority are multilingual and given that we have over 42 different languages - the language that mostly unites us is Swahili - it is also deemed less elitist.
The language is spoken across the entire East africa - (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique (Swahili name - Msumbiji), Burundi, Rwanda and Eastern DRC Congo.)
The article is an excerpt from a more detailed book and I agree with most it - but the author could have done a better job at investigating the origin of the language and early spread. It has borrowed heavily from Bantu, Arabic (countless words) and Portuguese (e.g. Pesa - money in Swahili, Meza - a table in Swahili).
- jph00 5y agoTo clarify for folks reading the parent comment and unaware: "kiswahili" and "swahili" are two words for the same language.
- _Chief 5y agothat's right. "Ki" in this context is a prefix that's used to denote a language or the language spoken by a people ("ki ya lugha" - ki of language). This is exactly like English has language suffixes -ish, -ic, -iese, -ian; for example English, spanish, arabic, japanese, vietnamese. Where "ki" globally serves in Swahili, for example kiswahili (language for the swahili - people of the coast), kiingereza (english), kirusi (russian), and if you don't know the correct language used in a place/country it's valid to say kiukraine (language spoken by the people of ukraine) As a Kenyan I found this read quite delightful, containing a lot I didn't know of the history of a language we speak. > Nyerere personally translated two of William Shakespeare’s plays into Swahili to demonstrate the capacity of Swahili to bear the expressive weight of great literary works.
- brnt 5y agoI've noticed that Westerners from larger countries, and from English speaking countries in particular, always struggle with grasping that in some and perhaps many places, people just speak a handful of languages. I am from a small European country, and I was also raised and schooled in four, and on top come electives and classics if you are so inclined. The impression what is commonly spoken is very much biased by this assumption. Many just don't speak one language all day long.
- occamrazor 5y agoWhere from? I am not aware of any country that uses more than two languages in school (except for foreign language classes of course)
- simongray 5y agoGonna guess Luxembourg.
- occamrazor 5y agoLuxembourg has two (French and German), and English as a foreign language.
- simongray 5y agoAlso Luxembourgish, so three + English.
- occamrazor 5y agoAFAIK Luxembourgish is used only in Kindergarten, not in higher school grades.
- cobbaut 5y agoBelgium also, Dutch-French-German and English.
- rvba 5y agoHow do you negotiate which language to use? Is there any custom when 2 people meet? What happens when few people meet? How do you agree which language to use? When someone advertises that they will speak in public do they announce in what language?
- vagrantJin 5y ago
- xeromal 5y agoI gotta say dude. Assume their question is genuine. Meeting their question with sarcasm doesn't help people.
- rvba 5y agoI literally asked what is the social convention for setting up the language that will be used in further conversation. Since I never lived in a country with multiple languages, I wonder how it is done, especially when multiple people are involved. The convention/algorithm here can be interesting from networking point of view. With 2 people probably some sort of recognition/negotiation is involved first? Maybe person A says "Hello", while person B says "Guten tag" and then the first person knows that they can try to use English or German. But what happens where the group is larger? Also what happens when person A doesnt speak language B and person B doesnt speak language A? How do they negotiate some other language C, since they know few? (obviously some language might be the default) Probably there is some social convention to do that too -> and Im curious how it works, because it sounds like an interesting topic. Do people list the languages that they speak? Or do they have some other clever trick. Still my speculations dont explain how this dynamics work for larger groups, what is an even more complicated topic. The rest of your comment, where you basically wrote that you can recognize what language to use on basis of how a person looks sounds very patronizing, if not racist.