Learn to Speak Swahili

As the first language of the Swahili people, who inhabit large stretches of land stretching from the coastline of Kenya to northern Mozambique, Swahili is spoken by about 10 million people as a native language and is spoken by approximately and additional 80 million others as a second language. Because Swahili is commonly used as a lingua franca in many different countries along the eastern African coastline, the language is extremely useful for those traveling or working across a large part of Africa, as it is used by many different ethnic groups as a common language. Swahili is also the only official language of the African Union that is of African origin, making it an important language culturally in the continent.

Although Swahili is a Bantu language, about 35% of the vocabulary is derived from Arabic as a result of the language evolving over thousands of years of contact between Arabic speaking traders and Bantu-speaking peoples of Africa's eastern coast. For this same reason, Swahili has also been influenced by Persian, German, Portuguese, Indian and English. With the centuries of outside influence, Swahili is one of the few sub-Saharan languages to have lost the tonal and pitch distinctions used to define meanings in words. Unlike in English, vowels are not reduced in Swahili, and each vowel is pronounced separately, a characteristic some native English speakers may find tricky.

There are many ways to learn Swahili. A good way to start is to see if the language is offered at your local community college, university or language learning institution. If no courses are available, another possibility is to look into hiring a private tutor to help you get started on learning the basics. Programs like Rosetta Stone can also be a great way to get you started on learning not only basic grammar and vocabulary, but also pronunciation and accent. Of course, the best way to learn any language is through total immersion. A few weeks spent interacting in a language on a daily basis can be worth more than a year in the classroom. Also, because Swahili is so widely spoken across so many different African countries, there is ample opportunity to practice and use your new language skills.