Portal:Language/Language of the month/March 2007

Swahili (also called Kiswahili) is a Bantu language the most widely spoken language of sub-Saharan Africa. Swahili is the mother tongue of the Swahili people (or Waswahili) who inhabit several large stretches of the Indian Ocean coastlines from southern Somalia as far south as Mozambique's border region with Tanzania. The number of native speakers is small, under 800,000. However, Swahili has become a lingua franca in much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, becoming a second language spoken by tens of millions in Kenya and Tanzania, where it is an official language. Find out more...